


(the rest is just) confetti

by novel_concept26



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV), The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Ficlet Collection, Gen, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:27:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 33,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28227624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novel_concept26/pseuds/novel_concept26
Summary: An assortment of unconnected filled prompts for Bly Manor and Hill House.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 79
Kudos: 417





	1. fading - dani clayton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Dani's thoughts as she is flying back to Bly for the last time.

She’s fading. She can feel it--the past six months have served as more than a warning, of how it will go in the end. Moments vanishing into hours without her consent. Hours becoming days before she can blink. She’s fading, all the pieces that once were Dani Clayton being wiped slowly--slowly--slowly away like a wet cloth across a blackboard.

She moves as quickly as she’s able, knowing there isn’t much time left. Knowing the moments-hours-days in this unplugged reality can only end one way. One way that is _acceptable_ , anyway. 

The Lady would prefer otherwise. The Lady would prefer another method, another road taken. Every day, Dani gets a little closer to walking that road. Every day, the Lady gets a little closer to the surface. 

She almost has a face, some days. Almost has a _self_ , some days, beyond anything Dani has been able to make out over the years. Sometimes, she opens her eyes and watches blue eyes, long lashes, hair so dark, it’s nearly black tumbling across a sharply beautiful face, and she thinks, _This will be me. If I let it. If I let her._ No more Dani Clayton. No more love of Jamie’s life. Just this woman, whose red lips turn up at the corners like she knows a secret Dani would kill to keep buried. 

She boards a plane. A nearly twelve-hour flight to London, they say, with expressions that suggest so much more. _You don’t look so good, Miss. You don’t look so good at all. Can we call someone to travel with you, to make certain you aren’t alone?_

_Not alone_ , she thinks hollowly. _Haven’t been alone in so long._

The last flight she boarded was so different. The last time on a plane, over a year ago, with Jamie at her side, had felt like one final bid for freedom. She hadn’t even cared where they were going--had just run her finger up a globe with her head turned to the side, heedless of where she’d land. Didn’t matter. Jamie’s hand over hers, Jamie’s ring caressing her skin, had been enough. 

The Lady followed her, of course. She’s been outrun by too many ghosts, never once able to pull ahead in the race for her own sanity. She knows by now--knew, even before the not-quite-face started appearing in every pane of glass--there would be no escaping. A sacrifice willingly made is only legitimate if it is driven to completion. 

But she’d thought--hoped--desperately needed--more time. More time with Jamie. More time burning popcorn, and lazily cherishing Sunday mornings in bed, and trying to wrap gifts the night before Christmas with Jamie bustling over mulled wine in the next room. More time. You get only so much, and she’s had so much more than she’s earned, but still--

_I wish_ , she thinks, and does not allow herself to go further. If she finishes that thought, it’ll all change. If she finishes that wish, she might turn around in a London terminal. Book the first flight right back. She imagines herself turning up on the doorstep, imagines Jamie’s shell-shocked face on the other side of the lock. Jamie, pulling her close, whispering into her hair that she is still _here_ , still _her_ , still pushing toward a future both of them can see growing thin. 

_I wish_ , she thinks, and does not finish. She leans her head back, lets her eyes close, letting Jamie’s sleepy smile play across her memory. The memories are really all she has now, for this final day. This final bid for _Dani_. She ought, she thinks, keep her eyes open. She ought, she thinks, drink in every color the world has to offer. The sunrise. The storm. The grass, the architecture, the human laughter which ties the world together on even the worst day. She ought to keep the world firmly in hand as long as she’s able.

But it’s memory that wins out, in the end. She’s so tired. Maybe this is the Lady’s gift to her--maybe this is the Lady being _kind_ , in her own horrific way. Not tucking Dani away, not really; Dani is terrified to let her hands off the wheel even for a moment, terrified she might wake to a plane in an unresolvable nosedive. She holds on, knowing it’s only for a little longer, knowing the exhaustion has to win out eventually--and knowing, even still, there is this one thing left to do. 

No; she does not allow herself to be _tucked_ anywhere. But the memories are stronger than the daylight stretching out beyond the plane carrying her home. The memories are stronger than the airline stewardess with her nervous eyes, than the drink cart rattling by, than the offer of food. Dani closes her eyes, and she is--

\-- _in a bathroom, Jamie’s shirt soft around her shoulders, Jamie’s hand firm around her upper arm. Jamie, eyes refusing to shed tears, Jamie, lips trembling, Jamie, reminding her she will stay, she will stay, she has to stay--_

_\--in a hotel in New York, skin stained with the neon of city lights strobing through the window as she kisses Jamie, as she keeps her eyes on Jamie’s face, as she watches Jamie cast her head back and arch into her hands--_

_\--in a restaurant in Paris, cigarette smoldering between her fingers as Jamie’s hand slides around her ribs. Jamie’s thigh relaxed beneath the stroke of her fingers, Jamie’s perfume mingling with her own from the careless, easy way Jamie had leaned her head against Dani’s shoulder on the cab ride over--_

_\--in their kitchen, a ring hidden in a pot, Jamie’s eyes widening with understanding as it clicks home that Dani is doing this, Dani is certain, Dani knows this is the thing to do even as she’s running out of time to do it. Jamie’s hands in her hair, Jamie’s thumbs on her cheeks, Jamie laughing and crying and kissing her all in mad, perfect joy--_

_\--in the back room of The Leafling, Jamie shushing her, listening for the knock at the door that says they ought to have opened back up after lunch twenty minutes ago. Jamie shushing her, and sighing, and giving up any pretense as Dani kisses her neck, hand slipped between trouser and skin, not caring the least about time as it marches on--_

_\--_ on a plane. She is on a plane, and the plane is touching down, and time is unraveling around her faster, now. She feels the world bend and twist, as though she is walking not on solid ground, but upon shifting waves. If she loses focus for even a moment, she might forget--might forget a woman cannot walk on water, might forget and sink under before she’s ready to go. 

Could she ever be ready to go?

She calls a car, wishing almost that it could be a dark-haired man in glasses and a leather jacket who steps out to help with bags she has not brought. She calls a car, and closes her eyes in the cold sunshine to wait, and she is--

_\--in an apartment barely furnished, takeout containers spread across the floor, Jamie’s head in her lap. Jamie, saying, “Christmas in Vermont--know it’s silly, but I feel like I was always supposed to be here.” Jamie, leaning up to kiss her with breath tinged with wine, the giddy anticipation of a new life dancing along her tongue as it slides between Dani’s lips--_

_\--in a bedroom no longer her own, tears running down her cheeks, Jamie’s pinky notched around her own. Jamie, in shades of blue and promise, saying, “D’you want company? While you wait for your beast in the jungle, do you want--” and pressing lips to white knuckle in a knight’s oath--_

_\--in a hallway, vibrating with need, wishing she could find the words to coax Jamie into another night. Just one more night, she thinks, knowing it could never be enough. One more. And one more. And one-- as Jamie is kissing her with sweet promise, Jamie guiding her hands up to hold tight, Jamie saying, “There are other nights, and there will be...”--_

_\--in a grove of glorious flowers, rain sweet on the air, feeling as though this is what it is to jump--to fly--to bury her hands in Jamie’s hair and linger in every inch of her skin, her jacket pulled tight between her fingers, her hips bumping into Dani’s like she never wants to be apart from her again as she recognizes, “Once in a blue goddamn moon, I guess”--_

_-in a kitchen filled with the mundane ease of afternoon meal, of new friends and new charges, a woman strolling in as though she has nowhere to be and no rush to find it, her eyes meeting Dani’s with the simple certainty of_ oh, hello, you _\--_

\--standing at a lake. She is dressed, she notes with distant alarm, in a tight red dress unlike anything she’s ever owned. She is dressed for a show no one else will see. A moment, she thinks, given to the Lady without realizing. And still, she wound up here. Still, her legs carried her all this way. The Lady had allowed it, or Dani had mandated it, but either way: she is here, now.

She is here, and she _wishes_. She wishes with everything she would not allow herself on the plane over. She wishes, and she dreams, and she knows she could not for all the world put Jamie through it. Even now. Especially now. 

She is twisting the ring, as she begins to walk.

She is holding the ring, as the waves lick higher. 

She is gripping the ring, as her shoulders, her neck, her head vanish beneath the waves. 

And this, here, a final gift--from the Lady, or from Viola, or from the magic of the night Dani Clayton gave up her future to save a child from this very fate. One more sweet moment granted, as she closes her eyes, as she lets the cold seep into her bones. Her lungs are quiet. Her heart does not pound from her chest. She is--

_\--in a bed with someone she has chosen, for the first time. In a bed, with someone who helps banish the shadows, just a little. In a bed, with Jamie’s hair curling between her fingers, Jamie’s skin sliding warm and supple against her own, Jamie kissing every part of her she’s never allowed anyone else to grace. Jamie, asking if she’s all right. Jamie, asking if she’s sure. Jamie, already loving her in ways she can’t yet know will punctuate her entire life._

_Jamie, holding her tight as she breaks, swells, breaks again. Jamie, kissing her brow, tasting her skin, testing the weight of her as she rolls them both over and takes the lead. Jamie, smiling with wonder, eyes dilated, body seeking contact as they move between soft sheets._

_Jamie, falling asleep not upon finishing, but in the middle of a conversation. Jamie, who has been asking about school, about favorite movies, about Dani’s first look at the stars and last time being sick, as though she’s trying to pack a lifetime into a single night. Jamie, punctuating every sentence with fingers tracing Dani’s every scar, every freckle, every beat of a heart that already sings Jamie’s name._

_Jamie, falling asleep mid-word, pushed tight against Dani as though making of herself a talisman against the dark. Jamie, breathing soft and deep and even._

_Jamie, with her now, with her always, with her until the very last._

_Jamie._

There is, at last, peace. 


	2. flocking - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: queer teen girl(s) flocking to The Leafling for a safe space (also to look at Jamie and Dani because...come on)

They don’t even realize it’s happening, at first. The cold months have come on strong, and customers are slowing to a crawl--the world is dim, the air has teeth, and even the allure of bright colors and fragrant life are not enough to coax people out into the snow. The shop is getting by on phone orders, bundled figures appearing out of the storm just long enough to exchange one sort of green for another before vanishing once again. 

When the teenagers come, Jamie thinks nothing of it. They aren’t the sort to worry over, she determines right off the bat--their eyes don’t skitter, their bodies don’t slink, there is no sign at all that one is playing hook while the rest filch items from the shelves. Anyway, theirs isn't the sort of shop that inspires theft. 

“Probably just cold,” she says when Dani points them out--the same four kids every time, huddled together as though for protection against something adults can’t quite make out. They creep among the flowers, hands firmly in pockets as though afraid any touch might inspire a wilt, a collapse, a destruction they can’t bear. 

They don’t come every day--maybe every other, maybe every three or four--but as the winter wears on, Jamie comes to anticipate them like a sort of questionable clockwork. They must be school-aged; they never turn up before four in the afternoon, and rarely loiter longer than an hour in unzipped coats, snow-speckled beanies, scarves draped around throats like casual armor against the wind. Slowly, they make their way through the shop, every step careful, every glance quick. They never buy, though from time to time, one might ask a question-- _what’s this one? is it poisonous? how long does it take to grow?_

Jamie answers one and all, remembering all too well what it was to be young and cold and lonely. There’s a firm delight in watching their faces open up--one girl’s brown eyes growing bright when Jamie asks her favorite flower, another leaning excitedly in when Jamie offers to show them how and why she’s arranging certain plants together. Dani leans against the counter, arms crossed, smiling. 

“You’re good with them,” she says softly when they’ve gone. Jamie shrugs. 

“Just being polite.”

It’s more than that, though, she knows deep down. More than being simply _kind_ , when she moves behind the counter one evening and tips her head toward the back room. The kids, moving as a single entity as if afraid to break some magic spell, step through to a space designed entirely for Dani and Jamie--a couch, a table for lunch breaks, an endless array of grow lamps and seed trays. They ooh and ahh, asking fevered questions: _why is this one so small_? _is this one sick? how do you know how often to water them?_

They remind her a bit of Flora, with their thirst for understanding, and a bit of Miles, with their nervous grins. They remind her, most of all, of Jamie herself at that age: gangly and uncertain in her body, stealing looks at women who seemed to carry themselves with a grace she’d never possess. Even now, the way they look at Dani when she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and rolls up her sleeves is familiar. That hunger for someone to _see_ them. That need to be noticed, and cared for, and respected. 

“Think the one in the pink’s got a bit of a crush,” she observes. Dani looks startled.

“Not on--”

It’s sweet, Jamie thinks. She doesn’t know quite how these kids found them--doesn’t know what quiet alarm bell must have gone off to tell them this place was safe, secure, for them. It’s good, to think they’re finding themselves here. That one seems to be learning she wants a garden of her own, bringing a notebook to jot down all the starter plants Jamie has to offer for spring. That another seems more interested in the business of it all, trailing Dani with questions about accounting and inventory and how they’d decided on the name. 

They all seem most interested in simply _being_ here. In breathing in the warmth, in trailing fidgety fingers across hardy leaves, in watching with rapt attention as Jamie shows them how to repot a plant too expansive for its own good. They haven’t grown to ask the real questions yet-- _who are you two, really? how did you meet? what is it like, being with someone who sees you for real?_ \--but Jamie thinks they might someday. Maybe in spring, when world exhales again. Maybe in the hope of summer, when Jamie might offer them all temporary jobs. 

For now, The Leafling is simply a place to escape the cold. It is quiet, and it asks nothing of them, and if their eyes linger on Jamie’s hand against Dani’s back, if their smiles grow unaccountably broad when Dani drops an unthinking kiss on Jamie’s cheek, it may be something else, too. Something that says, _you can be happy this way._ Something that says, _we’re here, too._

Jamie wishes she’d had something like this, at their age. She figures it is the least she can do for the girl she once was, to be here for them now.

“Softy,” Dani teases as they lock up. Jamie shrugs.

“Yeah, but when has _that_ ever been a surprise?”


	3. ringing - shirley and nell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Nell says Shirley almost always picked up the phone for her in the past—would you consider writing one of those conversations where Shirley actually DID help Nell?

The phone is ringing again.

The phone, it seems to Shirley Crain, never quite stops ringing these days. It’s Steven with excuses, or Theo to say she’ll be working late; it’s the rehab center with updates that make Shirley tired, or Dad trying to patch something too long broken to even find all the pieces. It’s people, mostly, strangers Shirley doesn’t know and can’t help letting in anyway--people who are aching with loss, adrift in their own shock, saying, “I don’t have much, but I want to do right by her--is this enough? Do you have packages that could...”

The phone is ringing, and Shirley is exhausted. A fifteen-hour shift, a headache that seems only to swell when she baits it with aspirin and cold water, a creeping guilt that never entirely fades when she catches sight her own reflection. 

It’s ringing. Still. Always. She closes her eyes, taps her fingers against the back of the phone case. Flips it over. 

Nell.

Of course. 

Shirley has never much believed in _sixth sense_ magic--in Theo’s furtive need for gloves, or Nell and Luke with their “twin thing”, or Dad’s peculiar brand of talking to shadows--but she always seems able to tell when the call is coming from her youngest sister. There’s an extra vibrato in the ringtone, somehow, when Nell is calling. An extra tremble in Shirley’s hand as she lets her finger hover over the accept button.

_Oh, might as well_. Nell will only call again in an hour, or two days, or next week. Might as well see what’s on her mind.

“Hello?”

“Sorry,” Nell says instantly. “Sorry, it’s late.”

Shirley’s eyes slide to the computer monitor, to the white numbers announcing an accusatory 9:07. _Shit. It is._ “Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed.”

“Oh.” A beat. Nell had clearly been prepared for sharp words, had clearly been ready to shield herself in endless apologies until Shirley came back to a level she could approach. _Am I like that?_ Shirley wonders with a wince. _Do they need armor to make this call?_

“What’s up, Nellie?” Too casual. Too smooth. She sounds like she’s trying to play Theo’s role, all cool eyes and darting snark. “I’m--it’s good to hear your voice.”

It is. She misses Nell more than she truly knows what to do with--misses Nell’s easy smile, the way she leans forward into a conversation with hands clasped between her knees, the furtive little looks she sends across the room to whichever sibling is making the most sense that day. Nell’s choice to move across the country had been reasonable--at least to Nell--but to Shirley, it had felt like one more battle lost. One more sibling stepping over the line to Steve’s way of thinking. 

“Nell?” She thinks for a minute the line has gone dead, that Nell has abandoned whatever worried twitch sent her hand skittering for Shirley’s name in her contact list. “Are you...”

“Sorry,” Nell repeats. “Sorry, I had--it was a weird day. Do you have those? The ones where you just...really need to hear someone’s voice?”

_Someone stable_ , she doesn’t say. Someone who isn’t hiding out in a nightclub, or warding off the urge for a needle, or pinning all the family trauma to a butterfly board with the biggest, sharpest knives he can find.

“Bad dreams again?” Shirley asks, and Nell exhales. Laughs. It’s shaky, that laugh--it sounds like Mom did, near the end of that summer, when she’d been all dressing gowns and pounding headaches. Shirley closes her eyes.

“No. I mean, yes. Yes, I guess. Always. But no. I think I just...you remember movie nights? I miss movie nights.”

Nell, always going back. Nell, always finding little ways to dig up the past. Sometimes, it’s like this: mundane, sweet, nostalgic. Sometimes, it’s harder to stomach. Shirley is grateful she's having this sort of night, the kind steeped in monotony. 

“What movie would you watch, if you could?” she asks. She leans back in her chair, lets her muscles slacken, lets Nell’s surprised giggle drag her over the line from exhausted mother, wife, businesswoman to sister. 

“This is stupid--I can never remember the name of it--the one that used to scare the pants off Luke? You remember?”

“Going to need to be much more specific than that,” Shirley says, smiling. Luke hadn’t found a movie he couldn’t run screaming from until he was almost twelve years old, and even then, it had been a matter of stiff upper lip above actual courage. 

“The one with the sea monster,” Nell says. “And the guy--the kid from those hockey movies--”

“Magic in the Water,” Shirley intones, remembering all at once a mock sleepover in Aunt Janet’s living room, sleeping bags spread across the floor. Theo, pretending she was too old to care about a baby movie; Luke, pretending he was too old to flip out whenever the screen got even remotely dark. 

“And Luke _hated_ it so much, she agreed to switch movies halfway through,” Nell goes on. “And she put on--”

“The fucking NeverEnding Story,” Shirley finishes, laughing despite herself. 

“Luke just _screaming_ when the luck-dragon shows up for the first time,” Nell says fondly. “And I’m trying to remind him that’s a _good_ guy. That’s a _good_ thing to have turning up. And Luke just goes--”

“Why,” Shirley recalls, “would you want a _dragon_ in your _house_?” She waits for Nell’s giggles to die down, for Nell’s breath on the other end of the line to level out again. “So, which one would you put on right now?”

“Easy,” Nell says simply. “The Secret Garden.”

It’s so out of left field, so perfectly _Nell_ that Shirley bursts into laughter again. She can hear Nell grinning, can picture her perfectly: dark hair curtaining a hopeful face, eyes bright as she leans across her table or into the comfort of her couch. Nell no-longer-Crain, with a ring on her finger and a house she’s made into a home miles and miles away from anything Shirley can touch. 

“I miss you, Nellie,” she says, shutting her eyes against a surprising well of emotion. “I really do.”

“Come out,” Nell says. “Next time you get a break, fly out and stay with us. Arthur would love to see you.”

_Next time you get a break._ Nell, dreaming again. Nell, believing with her whole heart that life is simple enough to allow for breaks, for impulse flights, for sisterly bonding time just because it’s needed. 

“You’re okay?” Shirley says, sidestepping the invitation for now. “You’re doing all right with all that sunshine?”

“Sure,” says Nell without missing a beat. Shirley imagines her smile dipping, the tension drawing back into her shoulders as she hunches smaller in her seat. “Sure. It’s great.”

_It’s great, Shirley. I’m great, Shirley. I only call because my head is ringing with monsters too big to shut out even after twenty-odd years, Shirley._

_She isn’t Mom_ , Shirley thinks. She isn’t Mom, muttering to empty rooms, or Dad, all vacancies and no space to rent. She’s just Nell: a heart laid open, beating too hard, waiting for someone to patch her up again. And if that never happens? If no one ever learns quite how to stitch her shut?

_She has Arthur_ , Shirley thinks, and there’s relief in the idea. Arthur and Nell, a closed circuit. Two people with all they could need in one house. Maybe there will be kids someday, or maybe they’ll sweep in at Christmas with expensive gifts and wild laughter, and it’ll all be--it’ll all just be--

_Great, Shirley. I’m great._

She hangs up gently on Nell’s soft goodbye, and wonders why it doesn’t quite feel like Nell was telling her the truth. 


	4. jealousy - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: what would jealousy look like between Dani and Jamie? (or: Dani is fairly certain one of their clients is falling for Jamie, who is utterly oblivious)

It’s not _jealousy_ , exactly. Jealousy is an ugly word, prompted by the belief that your person is, in fact, drifting--or that you are, in fact, not all there to hold their focus.

Which, admittedly, Dani isn’t. All there. Not all the time. But she still wouldn’t call this _jealousy_. Jealousy was Eddie’s arm tightening around her shoulders at the movie theater. Jealousy was her mother’s eyes darkening whenever a woman was too polite to her father as he ordered drinks. Jealousy was whatever kept Peter Quint locked to the Bly grounds, his fists tight around Rebecca Jessel’s desire to be better, even in death. 

Jealousy is ugly. This is not jealousy. This is...

Casual amusement. 

“So,” Jamie is saying, leaning against the counter and pointing to a brochure. “These are the most popular options for a wedding arrangement. You said you don’t want roses?”

“Tacky,” the bride says, her nose wrinkled. She’s probably in her early twenties, Dani gauges, and seems tailor-made for big, sprawling events like a wedding. Even the way she walks is orderly, her heels clacking, her body following a straight line from flower to counter and back as she speaks. 

The bride isn’t really the person Dani has been watching, all things considered. The bride knows exactly where she is, what she wants, how she’d like them to fall in line for her special day. 

It’s the other one. The maid of honor, who appears by all indication--jawline, hair color, similar smile--to be the bride’s sister. Maybe twenty-five, maybe a little older. Pretty, as these things go, though not exactly Dani’s type. 

Dani doesn’t seem to be her type, either, from the way her eyes drag up Jamie’s frame and linger around her lips. 

If Jamie has noticed any of this--the way this woman is quite literally attempting to phase through the counter to where Jamie is standing--she’s doing a remarkable job of not showing it. Her eyes sweep from bride to book and back again as she keeps up a steady stream of conversation primarily intended to keep the customer talking. Jamie’s method of finding exactly what a person is looking for is very similar to her method of living with Dani: coax them into talking about themselves, about their day, about what they like and don’t like, and piece the rest quietly together. 

She’s so busy listening, she seems to miss altogether the way the maid of honor reaches across the counter and drifts a hand close to Jamie’s. “What would _you_ pick, for your big day?”

Jamie smiles, and though her gaze does not cut to Dani, there’s something about the way she leans back and bumps Dani’s ankle with the heel of one boot that says it all. “Haven’t really thought about it, if I’m honest. Not really the white-wedding type.”

“What type are you?” the woman asks hopefully. Dani swallows a snort. Jamie only smiles. 

“Quiet, I think. Private.”

The woman chews this over, letting her fingers sneak closer to Jamie’s hand. Jamie, politely, retrieves her own fingers before contact can be made, her attention sliding seamlessly back to the task at hand.

“So. You’re thinking how many smaller arrangements, for the tables?”

Dani is not watching the maid of honor out of true jealousy, so much as curious interest. The world is changing around them a little more every year, celebrities beginning to come out as politicians bat around the legality of love they don’t understand, and things are...improving. Cautiously, she suspects things will continue to improve, that there might one day be a time where she’ll be able to take Jamie’s hand in a public restaurant. Kiss Jamie in a movie theater. Love Jamie in some way resembling acceptable for the eyes of strangers. 

Even then, even in a world where no one cares, she can't imagine the bravado of this woman. The sheer strength of will it takes for a strange woman to meet Jamie as she steps around the counter to show them out, her hand sliding up Jamie’s arm in a fashion not remotely professional. Her voice is soft as she leans in toward Jamie’s ear, her smile predatory. 

Dani watches with curious interest, and if there is something small--a ghost of anger, a ghost of sudden sharp heat in her stomach like a fist tightening--it is nothing. It is irrelevant. Jamie is her own person, is completely welcome to whatever interactions come her way. Jamie, she reminds that part of her which sometimes feels nothing like _her_ at all, loves her. 

_Loves you_ , that little part murmurs, _but can’t have you. Not all of you. Not the way this woman gets her husband, forever, with a ring, and a party, and a white dress--_

Jamie is stepping away from the woman, a slow roll back to match the tense smile on her lips. The woman’s face is darkening, something unpleasant in her gaze when it swings to find Dani. Jamie raises a hand, waves goodbye, allows them to round the corner before she flips the sign and latches the door.

“Unbelievable,” she mutters. “Did you see that?”

“The part where she was eating you alive for an hour, or the part where she tried to mount you right at the door?” Dani says dryly. That little kicking drumbeat in her chest is still pounding away, the squeezing fist rapping out a message she can’t ignore. _Even if it were legal. Even if they all understood. Even then, you wouldn’t be able to do it._

“Don’t think her sister didn’t notice, either,” Jamie says, rumpling her hair with one hand. “Think she’ll have some explaining to do this evening--hey, you all right?”

“Sure,” Dani says, too brightly. _Can’t have all of you, and doesn’t she deserve better? Doesn't she deserve someone who is always steady, always the same from dawn to dusk, who never looks into a mirror and sees--_

“Dani.” Jamie’s hands are on her shoulders, Jamie’s face much closer than she realized. She starts, nearly stumbles, relieved when Jamie’s grip tightens just enough to keep her upright. “You look like you’ve seen a--”

“Just...” Dani shakes her head. How to put this? How to explain it? “Just...something about that didn’t...sit right, I guess.”

“No,” Jamie agrees, “I’d think not. Handsy, wasn’t she? But I hope you don’t think--hope I’ve never given you cause to worry--’cuz, Dani, honest to God, I’ve never--”

She looks so nervous, it’s almost like the years have rolled back to a sunny day in this very shop, to a single moonflower and Jamie’s hopeful smile. All at once, that grip of fear in her gut loosens, Dani’s breath returning to her in a long sweep. 

“Jamie. Breathe.” 

“No, I only--I know how it probably looked, but she was trying to give me her number, and I--”

“Told her she’d have to get in line?” Dani teases. Jamie looks about ready to swallow her own tongue. 

“Told her I'd never met someone half as in love as me, and she should be lucky to find the same someday.”

“Oh my _god_ , Jamie, she’s never going to come back.” She’s laughing, unable to stop herself. Jamie, not looking even the least bit ashamed, tucks her hands into her pockets and shrugs. 

“I didn’t like the way you were looking at her, is all.”

“What, like I was going to escort her out in a fury and blame it on my low-key possession?” 

“No.” Jamie is not smiling. There is an earnest quality to her face, even as she reaches up and touches Dani’s cheek. “Like she was making you sad. Haven’t seen you like that since we left England. Dani, honestly, you know I’d never want...anything but this. Ever.”

It isn’t a question. It is maybe the truest thing Jamie has ever said, and it pulls at Dani’s heart harder for that. 

“I trust you,” she says quietly. “It wasn’t that. Wasn’t even her. Just...it’s enough? Even knowing we don’t know...even knowing there could only be--”

“It’s enough,” Jamie says, cupping her face in both hands, pressing her forehead to Dani’s with enough force to make them both laugh a little. “It’s always enough.”

She kisses Dani once, twice, and Dani lets herself linger in the moment. Lets herself forget about windows and strangers and tempting hands striving to coax Jamie off the path. None of it matters. None of it matters if Jamie is truly happy here, if Jamie is truly _home_ here. 

“I’m only saying,” she says when Jamie breaks, glances back over her shoulder, begins guiding Dani backwards toward the supply room. “You have options, for when I’m too old or too boring. What was she, the seventh one to try to slip you a phone number?”

Jamie groans. “What is it about me? Do I have _emotionally available_ stamped on my forehead? This never used to happen in England.”

“You scowl much less now,” Dani points out, breathless when Jamie sweeps an arm around her waist and dips her toward the couch. “And you wear all those suspenders--”

“Could tell them,” Jamie teases, following her down. “Could greet each and every woman at the door with, ‘Welcome to The Leafling, purveyors of fine floral arrangements, my name is Jamie and this perfect specimen is the love of my--’”

She’s kissing Dani, all jokes forgotten, and Dani finds herself dreaming--not for the first time--of wild possibilities. Of a sunset wedding, of friends gathered close, of Jamie kissing her just like this in front of anyone who matters even a little bit. Of what it would be like, to look at Jamie and know how _real_ they are, even in the moments Dani doesn’t feel real at all. 

_Doesn’t take a wedding for that_ , she thinks, as Jamie’s lips trail down flushed skin. _Doesn’t take anything except for her...and me...and..._

There’s a ring she’s been looking at. A simple thing, gold, heart-hands-crown. No one would know. No one would need to know. All that matters is...all that matters is...

_She can’t have all of you_ , that horrible awareness of time mutters. Dani closes her eyes, grips tighter to Jamie as she vanishes into the kiss. 

_She gets everything that counts_ , she decides here and now. _She gets it until there’s nothing left to give._


	5. dreams - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Owen and Jamie both mentioned having bad dreams that brought them back to the lake that night. What about a little scene where Jamie tells Dani what drew her back to Bly that night to find her and Flora in the lake?

“What brought you back?” 

It’s been days--two, Jamie thinks, though time seems to be unraveling in a way unique to grief--since the lake. Since finding Dani with a foreign color in one eye, a child in her arms, a shiver in her bones no amount of firewood seems able to coax out again. It’s been days, and she hasn’t been able to bring herself to leave Dani’s side. 

Dani doesn’t fight her. Dani, instead, seems magnetized in some fresh way, always finding her way back to Jamie no matter the situation. Jamie returns from the kitchen with mugs of hot tea she nearly splashes on the both of them when Dani shifts out of a shadow, hugging herself with nervous intensity. Jamie moves toward the front door and finds Dani waiting outside in a jean jacket and vacant stare, wondering if Jamie can find something for her to do with her hands. She can’t sit still, it seems, unless Jamie is holding her--and even then, she can’t stop shaking. 

She hasn’t asked many questions. Hasn’t spoken much, except when spoken to by one of the kids, by Wingrave asking dazedly for advice on tiny matters around the house. Things that should have been Hannah’s purview, or Owen’s--things that should, in a world that makes any kind of sense, still belong to their flirtatious grins, their genial banter, their soft way of moving around one another in a constant orbit. 

Dani answers politely, matter-of-factly, and when Jamie moves slightly out of reach, she seems to drift as though under a power not entirely her own until her hand can slide into Jamie’s once more. 

It’s on the second--or possibly third--day that she asks it. “What brought you back?” Her voice holds that same level, matter-of-fact tone from telling Flora to brush her teeth, telling Miles to tie his shoe before he stumbles. “What brought you back that night?”

Jamie hums to buy time, gazing at the ceiling. They’re wrapped close in Dani’s bed--what Jamie has come all too quickly to think of as _their_ bed, uninterested in going back to the cold quiet of her own flat ever again, so long as Dani needs her--as the hours drift from late to midnight. Dani’s head is on her chest, Dani’s hand closed tight around her t-shirt as though holding Jamie in place with nothing more than her own urgency. 

“Told you. Had a dream.”

“You said that,” Dani says quietly. “But it...I mean, it doesn’t make sense, right? A dream. Dreams are weird.”

“They are.”

“They don’t usually force you out of bed and into the car.”

Jamie sighs. “It...you’ll think I’m...” She can’t finish the sentence. Can’t say that final word, which has been haunting Dani since the moment they met, and seems only to have tightened its hold on her life since the lake. 

Dani raises her head very slightly, her smile nowhere near meeting her eyes. “Crazy?”

“It was a dream,” Jamie repeats. “A nightmare, I guess. Nothin’ more.”

“But you came.”

_You needed me._ Not that there was any way to know that. Not that there was any reason to _assume_ that. She’d gone to bed that night after a cold shower, face in her hands as she’d relished the memory of Dani asking her to stay. The memory of Dani’s kiss, her hands pressing Jamie close, her urgent hope so clear, Jamie still isn’t sure how she’d denied Dani its power. 

“It sounded like Hannah,” she says now, slowly, each word fragmented in her mouth. It _hurts_ to think of Hannah--of Hannah saying, “Not you, oh, not you. What are you _doing_ here?”--of Hannah’s eyes huge and screaming in her normally-serene face. It _hurts_ , to remember the way Hannah had looked at them, and how Jamie hadn’t even had time to reach out to her, hadn’t even been able to pause to consider what might turn Hannah from the elegant woman of her memory to this terrified version stumbling out of the dark. 

“The dream,” Dani presses. Her hand traces Jamie’s collar, her fingers light on Jamie’s skin. Jamie shivers, does not reach to stop her, and Dani keeps going--trailing the backs of her fingers up Jamie’s neck, her nails along the line of Jamie’s jaw, as if memorizing Jamie in this tactile method is the only thing keeping her in this bed. 

“It sounded like Hannah screaming,” Jamie says, and closes her eyes. “Have you ever heard Hannah scream?”

Dani shakes her head once, thumb swiping across Jamie’s chin, fingers splaying along her cheek. Jamie closes her eyes tighter. 

“Nor I. Not once in three years of knowin’ her. But she was screaming in this dream--like she couldn’t breathe right. Like something had her by the throat and...and she was shouting for us both. Me and Owen.”

Dani sits up, watching her steadily. That brown eye is eerie even still, though each hour sets it more firmly into her face, tries a little harder to convince Jamie it’s always been a part of Dani Clayton. She swallows, lets Dani’s hand continue its play up the planes of her face, stroking along her lips, her nose, the curve of cheekbone. 

“She was screaming, and I was running, and the lake was...everywhere. Had come up off its banks somehow--I thought maybe a storm had...dunno, but it was creeping up to the house. And I just kept thinking...just kept seeing your room. This room. Underwater.”

It hadn’t been Dani’s room, then, though--not if she’s honest with herself, not if she tries to call the dream back like a film gone in reverse. It hadn’t been Dani’s room yet, this horribly sunken version of bed and nightstand and lamp. 

It had been Rebecca, hadn’t it? Rebecca, wrapped around herself with nothing more to hang onto. Rebecca, staring with horrified eyes up into the lapping waves as they drew ever nearer. 

_Trauma_ , thinks Jamie, _does funny things. Plays funny tricks on a person._ She can’t forget Rebecca’s body in that lake, even now, facedown in that black dress. She can’t forget the drift of her hair, the boneless sprawl of her limbs, the horrible bloated cast to her skin. 

What horrors will Hannah wreck from beyond the grave, she worries. What will Hannah visit upon her, that final lasting image of a woman at the bottom of a well? 

“I knew,” she says hollowly. “In the dream, I knew if the water got to you before I did...if you went under before I could...and I’d _promised_ you, Dani, I’d just promised you there would be other--”

Dani’s fingers press to her lips, stilling the words before they can stumble and rattle over one another. Before she can begin to rave, the horror of dark and cold and impossible threading into a net that might drag her under. 

“A dream,” Dani says softly. “It was a dream.”

_It was_ , Jamie wants to say, _and it wasn’t. It was Hannah. Somehow._ Because hadn’t Owen, on the other end of the phone, blustered the same? Hadn’t Owen said, “This is gonna sound--but Hannah--Hannah’s underwater, Hannah’s drowning, we have to go back--”

“A dream,” she says shakily, and knows she’ll never be able to forget it. Not the insistent creep of black water up over rosebushes, tumbling statues, tracing hungry fingers beneath the doors of the manor. Not the way Dani’s room had rocked like a ship unmoored as it had filled higher and higher, Dani’s horrified eyes reflected in a lake that had no business climbing past its bounds. 

“Had to do it,” she says. “Had to get to you before...”

Dani surges in, kisses her, agony and affection mingling in a moment that catches Jamie before she can drift. She finds herself clinging to Dani as one clings to a life raft, hands in Dani’s hair, mouth opening to accept whatever Dani can offer tonight. Dani feels so solid, even when her gaze is a million miles away. Dani’s hands are so real, even while her voice trembles and her bones shake beneath paper-thin flesh. 

“Just a dream,” Dani repeats, half a moan, like banishing a campfire horror. “Just a dream, just a dream, just a--”

Jamie sinks into her, eyes closed, understanding there are some wishes too big to be granted. Too truths too true to accept. _Just a dream--and just the future, somehow, knocking on a door I won’t open. Not ever. Not with her standing with me on the other side._

Hannah’s voice is banished by Dani’s kiss now, by the slide and rock of Dani’s body fitting against her own. Hannah’s screams are put to bed, replaced by Dani’s breath in her ear, Dani’s acceptance of every inch Jamie is able to give. 

They will be back, Jamie thinks. Little by little. Less and less. To some degree or another, they will be back. She’ll never entirely forget that night. 

In a way, she’s grateful. This final rescue at the hands of Hannah Grose. This final protective ward cast over the house to which she’d given so much. 

She only hopes Hannah knew, before it all went dark, she’d saved them all. 


	6. trick door - theo and nell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: something with nell and theo? they're my fave dynamic. doesn't matter what or when it takes place, but something happy?

There is a trick to Theo the others don’t seem to know. A trick--like a secret knock on a clubhouse door, like a magic word, like a faerie ring. It took Nell _years_ to figure it out, so she can’t much blame the others for not understanding. They’re all busy all the time--Steven with his typewriter, Shirley with her photos, even Luke, drawing and drawing and trying to pretend he isn’t still counting to seven even at thirteen. They don’t have time to figure out little magic spells, little hidden locks and trick doors that pop open if you just bang on them right above the hinges. 

Theo is like a trick door--and once you figure out your way in, you get to stay. Theo is only good at keeping people out, not throwing them back once they’ve made it past her moat, her walls, her army with flaming arrows. 

“Too much Lord of the Rings,” Theo says when Nell points this out, but she doesn’t look mad. Doesn’t look like she’s going to tell Nell to fuck off--that’s Theo’s favorite word these days, sixteen and fuming just about all the time: _fuck_ you, _fuck_ that _, fuck off_. 

Nell whispers the word to herself under cover of darkness, trusting no one but Luke will ever hear, and trusting Luke to keep it to himself. Luke is quiet these days, distracted, always smelling of cigarette smoke and the sick tang of fear, but he doesn’t tell. He doesn’t tell anyone about Nell’s screaming fits at night, about Nell’s terror of rounding a corner too fast, of climbing a flight of stairs before switching on a light. Doesn’t tell anyone that there’s someone waiting at the top for her too often, someone with a long gown, lank hair, a twisted, horrible neck--

She looks up from her homework, inspects the sprawl of Theo at her desk. Theo, in jeans with the cuffs turned up, patches sewn into the knees, Sharpie’d words and faces staining the denim. Theo, who has long abandoned her childhood affection for hats, but who seems never to be without a pair of gloves. 

Theo, who catches her staring and frowns. “What.”

She always says it just like that, no question mark at the end: _What. What, Nell. What are you looking at, Nell._

“Nothing,” says Nell quickly, and goes back to Lord of the Rings. Theo grunts, leaning over her own work like she thinks Nell is going to copy, somehow. 

“You’re being weird,” she says after a minute. Nell closes her eyes. If she had a dollar, she thinks. _Weirdo Nell. Crazy Nell. Hey, Crazy Crain, you still seein’ ghosts?_

“Not sleeping so well,” she says quietly. Theo makes a noise that might be annoyance with anyone else; with Nell, it usually indicates she’s listening, even though her eyes never leave her workbook. 

“When have you ever?”

Nell laughs once, short and hollow. Thirteen is too young, Janet says sometimes, for a laugh like that. A laugh like that belongs to a woman of the world, a woman who has terrors under her belt, who has _seen_ things. 

_I’ve seen things_ , Nell thinks, the image of a woman with a bent neck and an unhinged scream imprinted on her mind more clearly than memories of her own mother. 

“School good?” Theo asks, in that neatly-removed way she has of asking anything. _Careful_ , thinks Nell with amusement too old for her years. _Don’t want anyone overhearing you actually caring._

She can’t be upset with Theo for it. She thinks sometimes that if she, Nell, is the watcher of the family--the one who sees Steve’s agitation, Shirley’s close-lipped anger, Luke’s battering-ram terror--then Theo is the listener. Except Theo maybe doesn’t have _space_ for all that listening. Theo maybe shored up all the cracks in her a long time ago to keep all the dark, dirty, ugly parts from creeping in and filling her up. 

Nell is, as much as she knows how to be, envious. She can’t imagine closing the doors that hang open in her head. Can’t imagine being strong enough to shove against them until no one else can get inside. 

“School’s fine,” she says. “Luke’s flunking.”

“Luke’s always flunking.” Theo raises her eyes, brows narrowed. “You’re not still doing his homework.”

Nell shakes her head, not trusting her tongue. Theo can smell a lie as sure as alcohol on Luke’s breath when he staggers home from the boys he calls friends, the ones who only stopped calling Nell batty because Luke threatened to knock them over. He could do it, she thinks. He’s bigger than most of them now, except Steve, and getting taller every day. Solid where Steve is lean, a tower in broken glasses and rumpled hair. Sometimes she looks at him and wonders if her brother is even still in there, under all the stupid unfunny jokes thirteen-year-old boys crave. Under all the terror Luke has always sheltered beneath. 

He is. He has to be. She doesn’t know what she’d do without him. 

“You gotta let him sink or swim sometime, Nellie.” Theo shakes her head. “Can’t carry him forever.”

“I’m not,” Nell insists. _Helping_ isn’t wrong, she thinks. Everybody needs help sometimes. Even Theo. Theo, who is a trick door, who will let a person in if they’re small and quiet and don’t ask anything of her. Theo, who is a trick door Nell found a way past years ago simply by being willing to sit in the corner with a book, with a doll, with her own thoughts, and let Theo breathe. 

Theo turns in her chair, fixing Nell with such a stare, Nell almost withers beneath its potency. Theo is like someone else, when she looks at Nell this way--like someone Nell can’t quite remember from another life. 

“What?” A question mark, from Nell’s lips. She feels as though she’s always asking questions, and no one ever seems to have answers to any of them. 

“You’re not flunking,” Theo says slowly, “right? You’re not--you don’t need help?”

She says it grudgingly, like she’s not sure anyone should _need_ help. Like she’s not sure she’d have the space to offer it, if Nell said yes. It’s tempting to try. Tempting to say, _Actually, Theo, yeah--yeah, I do need help. Only, I’m still seeing her. She’s still following me, and I can’t talk to anyone about it, not even Luke, and I need--I need_ \--

The rules with Theo are simple. Quiet. Stay quiet, stay out of Theo’s way, remind Theo there is space for people who don’t imprint themselves onto her skin and force her to carry them. 

“I’m good,” she says, and smiles. Theo squints. Nods. 

“I was thinking,” she says. “This weekend. I was going to get my ears pierced.”

“You already have your ears pierced,” Nell observes. Theo grins. 

“Again, I mean.” She leans back in her chair, lets the legs pop off the floor. The last time Nell tried to emulate that trick, she’d toppled over in math class and slammed her head on a cabinet. Theo makes it look effortless. “You wanna come?”

Nell almost claps her hands, almost leaps up, almost forgets the rule: quiet. Quiet and easy. The best way to stay in Theo’s good graces is to vanish into the wallpaper. She settles for grinning back. 

“Can _I_ get my ears pierced again?”

“Aunt Janet will be mad,” Theo says, but she’s sixteen, and she’s effortless, and Nell couldn’t care less what anyone but Theo thinks just now. 

Most anyone. 

She imagines Luke clapping a hand to his ear and wincing, the cigarette falling from his lips onto the gravel of the playground. It’s an image more satisfying than she’d like to admit. 

“Please?” she says. Theo shakes her head. 

“Only,” she says, turning back to her work, “if you don’t tell her it was my idea.”


	7. unstable - dani clayton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: something from the point of view of Dani as a ghost, watching Jamie after her death

Time is unstable now. It’s almost the same as those last few months, really--the instability had become the only thing, the only certainty to a day. Hours had blinked back to moments; moments rushing forward to days. She’d closed her eyes on a Tuesday, woken on a Saturday, had been dimly aware of moving and speaking and managing all that time without ever feeling its fingers on her skin. 

Time is unstable now. It’s almost what she’s used to, almost the same--except it goes backwards, sometimes. Goes all the way backwards, sometimes. She opens her eyes, and she’s watching herself move in slow motion across these very grounds, her eyes blue, her skirt long, stumbling across a girl and a song at this very lake. 

No idea. She’d had no idea. 

Time is unstable now. It twists and it bends, and she thinks she could learn to control it, as the hours turn to days turn to years. How long has it been already? There’s no telling. There’s nothing to hang onto, no handhold, no markers along the miles. She moves, and it’s like being awake, sometimes--there is sun, and there is shadow, and there is moonlight. There is a life once lived--well lived--well loved--beneath her skin. She knows it, somehow. Knows it, the way you know a dream even as it dissolves in the shower as you prepare for--

School.

Work.

Life. 

Time is unstable now. It builds and it skews and it stumbles sideways into itself, and she’s seeing it all. A boy with curly hair stepping out of a car into the path of a casket. A girl in a sundress with a father, a mother, a home chipped and broken and pieced back together with desperation. A man who thought he loved her; a woman who couldn’t love him back. A plane. A backpack. Hands belonging to strangers, smiles crooked on her own lips, a resume offered in a neat office. A job lost. A job won. A pair of glasses in the mirror. 

Time is unstable now. It spins and it wheels, and she remembers it all--remembers walking into this lake, remembers walking beside this lake, remembers a child being carried to doom in this lake, remembers arms around her waist in this lake, breath on her lips, _shh, shh, it’s okay, Dani, it’s okay--_

Time is unstable now. It shuffles and it dances and she’s trying to center herself. Trying to remember how long it’s been since she stopped being entirely her--years, she thinks. Decades, she thinks. A night a million miles away, a choice made, words spoken. She said the thing, and she became something new. Something half Dani Clayton-half Viola Lloyd. Something half woman, half ghost. Someone who hadn’t known, even then, what she was giving up--or what she’d fight so hard to keep for as long as she could. 

Time is unstable now. It cavorts and it cartwheels, and how long since she stopped breathing? Since she stopped being that half-and-half, that slow-fade, that peace-becomes-fear, and became instead: this. This version of herself who holds no weight, who leaves no mark behind, who does not possess skin or mass or footprint, and who is, still, somehow...here. Here. More here than she ever thought she’d be again. 

Why is she still _here_?

_You are_ , the voice says in her ears, hopeful, hopeless, _you are still_ here _._

_Her hand_ , she thinks, and she’s gripping the ring. The ring. The ring. The--

Time is unstable now. It jolts and it jounces, and she is in a kitchen making a proposal, and she is in a kitchen watching a woman wash her hands, and she is in a kitchen shattering a plate while Jamie holds her, holds her, repeats, “We could have so many more years. Dani. Dani. We could have so many--”

Time is unstable now. It ricochets and it roils, and she is standing here. Standing here. Waiting for something she knows is coming. Waiting for something she knows still needs her, still pulls at her, still forms its own insistent gravity--

Time is unstable now. 

Jamie, as she has always been, is not. 

Jamie, out of that cab in the same shirt she’d slept in. In Dani’s jeans, and sneakers that had really belonged to them both. Jamie, shoulders rounded and back straight, dragging breaths. 

_Don’t_ , she thinks. _Don’t, you don’t want to see it._ Knowing it won’t be real until Jamie does. Knowing it won't be real for Jamie--and maybe not for her, either. Time is so unstable. Time is so unbound around her, casting her into a grove of moonflowers-- _once in a blue goddamn moon, I guess_ \--and into a hallway-- _there will be other nights_ \--and into a bedroom-- _are you sure, Dani, I only want to if you’re sure_ \--and into--

The lake. Jamie is in the lake. Up to her waist, up to her chest, drawing a deep breath and diving. 

It becomes real only when Jamie looks it in the eye. When Jamie sees her--what was her--what can’t be her any longer, because it _belonged too much to the Lady, Jamie. It belonged too much to the spell. It couldn’t last, because nothing does, because there is no forever for flesh and blood, Jamie. You taught me that. You told me that, that it’s so beautiful that we can’t last, that it’s so gorgeous that we can’t hang on forever. You said it. You meant it, then._

Jamie has been under too long. Jamie has been under too long, and time is unstable, time is unreliable, time is a twisting net tossed over her--but Jamie has looked, now. Jamie has seen, now. And if it’s enough to solidify the thing for Jamie, if it’s enough to let her fall over the cliff, it’s enough for this, too. For her to follow Jamie into the water. It’s easier this time; she doesn’t have to worry about the burn in her lungs, the ache in her head, the terror and the peace trading hands like a kid passing baseball cards. She follows Jamie down, and Jamie is reaching, Jamie is screaming, Jamie is saying those words, those hated, magical words--

She wraps both arms around Jamie. Pulls her toward the surface. Feels Jamie go limp, letting herself rise as the horror and the shock set in for real. Time is unstable now, but Jamie isn’t--Jamie is a real, living, breathing human being who must still abide by certain rules. Who must still kick her way to the surface and break, gasping, as Dani hugs her close. 

She doesn’t see, it’s clear. Can’t feel Dani, it’s clear. Can’t know, as she collapses on the bank, her hair sopping, her face streaked with tears, that Dani is behind her with arms around her shoulders. That Dani is bowed over her, breathing with her, urging her back to reality with every slow inhalation. 

Dani, holding her, does not sink in. Does not vanish beneath Jamie’s skin. Does not close her eyes here and open there, seeing what Jamie sees. Jamie is still muttering-- _you, me, us_ , _goddammit, Dani, please_ \--and still, she does not allow herself that cruelty. Not for an instant. 

_You are not mine_ , she thinks with everything she has, and knows Jamie doesn’t understand. Can’t possibly, not yet. Knows Jamie has no sense of the gravity she maintains, that Dani couldn’t deny the pull of that gravity even if she wanted to. 

Her body remains behind, as all bodies must--and it will break, over time. She understands there will be the natural passage, the natural flow of time and water and organic degradation. It doesn’t matter. Her body remains behind. 

She is with Jamie in the cab. 

She is with Jamie on the plane. 

She is with Jame in their apartment. 

She is with Jamie every step of the way. 

_You are not mine_ , she thinks every night, as Jamie begs the mirror, as Jamie pleads with the bath, as Jamie slams a fist down on the countertop and closes her eyes and sinks into grief. _You are not mine, Jamie, you have to understand._

She doesn’t. She can’t. Maybe someday, Dani thinks. Maybe someday, she will allow the truth to take root in her bones: that no person can ever own another, not with all the love and well-meaning the world can muster. That to love someone _is_ to let them go, no matter what they might demand in return. 

Time is unstable now. It burns and it bleeds, and Jamie walks through it in horrible, painstaking chronology. Monday becomes Tuesday. April becomes May. Each year falls in line, and Dani wishes she could show her. Wishes she could explain that she is _here_ \--she is ten, and she is thirty, and she is forty-two, and she is in love with Jamie in all the ways that extend beyond clock and calendar. That she is in love with Jamie before she even knows her, and she is in love with Jamie long after time has forgotten them both. That she is here, and she is here, and she is _still here._

Time is unstable now. She can see how it all will unfold, a tablecloth shaken out: Jamie swearing over tattered roses, and Dani kissing her in a greenhouse, and Dani offering a ring, and Jamie saying, _I’m actually pretty in love with you, it turns out._

Jamie, telling a story at a wedding. 

Dani, taking in a story in a moonlit grove. 

Jamie, falling asleep with her head on Dani’s chest. 

Dani, waking slowly with Jamie in her arms. 

It’s all the same, she wants to say. It’s all falling around us, moments, memories, in an endless sweep like rain. It’s all the same, she wants to say. You are here. I am here. We are here. 

Time is unstable now. Jamie is sleeping in a chair, Dani’s hand on her shoulder. Jamie is sleeping in a bed, Dani inspecting her scar for the first time. Jamie is sleeping in a greenhouse, decades of life behind her, never to wake again. Opening her eyes at Dani’s knock on the door. To Dani, who has been waiting a second, a year, an eternity to welcome her home again.

Time is unstable. 

Dani settles in for the ride. 


	8. blood - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Dani is a bit squeamish about her own blood so when she gets hurt at home or in the shop she literally can't even look at the injury. So obviously Jamie (who I expect has seen a lot of blood in her lifetime) has to patch her up.

“How,” Jamie asks, in a voice just this side of amused, “did you even do this?”

“I was--” Dani tilts her head away, breathing in sharp, uncontrolled inhalations that never seem to entirely fill her chest. “I was--trying to--”

Jamie pauses, free hand sliding to squeeze Dani’s uninjured one. “Gonna need you to stop until you can assure me you aren’t about to pass out.”

“I’m--fine--”

“You’re making me nervous, is what you’re doing.” Jamie leans back on her haunches, eyes searching Dani’s face. “Where’re the kids?”

“Hannah.” Dani closes her eyes, swaying in place so violently, Jamie isn’t entirely sure she’ll stay in that chair much longer. She presses a hand to Dani’s knee, squeezing in time with her own long, slow breaths until Dani begins instinctively to match her. 

“There we are. Okay. Try again. How did you manage this?”

“Was trying,” Dani says again, “to open the shed.”

“The shed,” Jamie repeats. “The one I expressly tell the wee beasties to leave alone, given that the door is not fit for human hands? And will, in fact, slam shut on a person without warning? That shed?”

“They told me there were--bikes--”

Jamie swears under her breath. “Cretins.”

“They’re kids, Jamie.” “They could’ve gotten you amputated, Poppins. Accident or not, don’t think you’d be thrilled with one less hand to your name.” She watches Dani’s face for flickers of amusement and, finding none, whistles. “Seriously, you were maybe half a moment from needing to favor your--hang on, you right-handed?”

Dani nods once, eyelids fluttering. Jamie nods sagely. 

“Lucky indeed, then. I’ve seen your handwriting, Poppins, can’t imagine what it’d look like if you had to train your reserve up.”

Dani laughs, a single braying burst that seems to take her by surprise. Jamie squeezes her knee again, trying not to look too closely at the gallop of her own heart when Dani’s good hand scoots over to cover her fingers. 

“How bad is it?” Dani is doing a truly admirable job of looking both as though she has never wanted to see something less in her life and like curiosity might actually kill her. Jamie reaches up, gently turns her head away once more. 

“Bad enough you don’t want to peek, fine enough for me to patch without a hospital run.” In truth, the wound isn’t deep. Dani must have snatched her hand back from the door mid-slam, two fingers caught in the crossfire. She might, Jamie observes as she gingerly shifts the hand over for a better look, lose a nail. Her knuckles will likely be swollen for a week, and the whole thing will hurt like fuck, but the actual blood is dripping from reasonably shallow cuts.

“I’m okay,” Dani says miserably. “This is--this is embarrassing, I’m sorry--”

“Sorry for listening to kids, or sorry you needed the help?” Jamie gives one finger an experimental press with her thumb, relieved when Dani doesn’t scream or drag her hand back in agony. “Can you bend this?”

Wincing, Dani does. Jamie nods again.

“Not broken. Good sign. Okay. How are you with sudden blinding pain?”

“What?” Dani asks, but Jamie is already pouring disinfectant across the open wounds. Dani hisses through her teeth, whipping her head around to glare at Jamie’s face. “ _Shit_.”

“Yeah,” Jamie says agreeably. “Think how much worse it’d have been if you were tense.”

“Right,” Dani almost laughs. “This isn’t tense.”

She stays quiet as Jamie cleans the cuts with a soft cloth, as Jamie runs gingerly across the bruises spreading up from the knuckles. Only when Jamie begins bandaging does she speak again.

“Thank you. Really. I’m...I’m embarrassed, I--”

“Stop,” Jamie says. Dani frowns. 

“I’m just...I’m a grown--”

“You are,” Jamie says, binding the two fingers together. “A grown, perfectly capable woman who smashed her hand in a door. And y’know what that makes you in my book?”

Dani waits, her eyes furtive, her mouth tense. Jamie finishes the job with minimal flourish, careful to move the bloody cloth out of sight before Dani can turn her head. 

“Patched.”

Dani slides a nervous glance toward her injuries, seemingly surprised to find them hidden beneath clean bandage. “That’s it?”

“You were expecting, maybe, some localized cauterization?” Jamie pushes herself to her feet, brushing her hands on her overalls. “Can be arranged, if you like. I’ll just get my axe, Owen’s little blowtorch out of that drawer...”

“I mean,” Dani says, almost sounding more pained to be having this conversation than she had when she’d staggered in ten minutes ago, bleeding hand clutched to her chest, so pale Jamie had quite literally dropped what she was doing to catch her under the arms. “I mean...you...you’re...really good at that.”

“Had to be,” Jamie says lightly. “Been taking care of myself since--well. A while. You know how many little war wounds you pick up, grounds like these?”

“Well, you knew about the shed.”

“Certainly did. Should’ve warned you, too, come to think of it. I’ll make you a list of all the shite I’ve told them time and again not to fuck about with.”

Dani watches her as she moves to the sink to wash up, working the blood out from her own skin and trying not to think too much about it. Trying not to think, either, about how Dani had stumbled into the kitchen as though looking for her in particular, how she’d gasped out, “Jamie--I’m--not so good with blood, I hoped--”

“You’ve been a teacher how long?” she asks over her shoulder, raising her voice above the running water. “Never had to tend a scrape?”

“It’s different,” Dani says. “Other people’s--when other people need help, it’s like a switch just...turns off in my head.”

Jamie nods, wiping her hands on a towel. “And that switch doesn’t apply when you’ve busted your own fingers.”

“Nowhere to be found,” Dani says with a shaky laugh. “Dumb, isn’t it? It’s just a bit of blood.”

It’s more than that, Jamie thinks. More a matter of mortality, when it’s your own blood--a matter of the pain shrieking up your every nerve, rattling out all logic and leaving behind the awareness that you are damaged, that you have broken, that you are alone and in pain with no one to remedy the matter. 

“It hurts,” she says simply, leaning back against the sink and meeting Dani’s eyes again. “When it’s you. Pain shuts off an awful lot of good sense.”

Dani nods, cheeks pink. Jamie moves closer, careful not to step back within Dani’s bubble now that she has no cause. 

“C’mon. Those kids need a reminder as to what they ought not to be playing around with. You good?”

She is, Jamie thinks. She’s good, and she’s strong, and a little blood changes none of it. 


	9. a quiet affair - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: After the proposal scene, do you think they considered themselves engaged and like, planned a wedding ceremony?

It’s a quiet affair. Private. Jamie has never thought much of weddings, of the big explosive events that beg for attention, for near-strangers piling in from out of town, for gifts and cards and money spilled in every direction. Jamie has always thought, quietly, in a space reserved only for herself, that weddings are too expansive to be allowed. That love is too enormous to be contained in a white dress, a tiered cake, a church. 

She asks, that night, wound close to Dani in bed with that ring so new and so bright on her finger, if Dani has thought about it. If Dani needs that, wants that, with her. She’d said _we can’t technically get married--but I don't really care_ , and she’d smiled a little, and Jamie had thought, _Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if anyone ever knows._ Easy to think, in a moment of absolute jubilation. Later, with her head on Dani’s chest, with Dani’s hand trailing absently through her hair, she wonders. 

There’s something about the admission. About the announcement. About the rooftop cry of _this is ours, this perfect, flawed thing I built with her._ There’s something about the idea she finds appealing in ways she’d never bothered to imagine before Dani and a ring and a promise made by evening light. 

Dani doesn’t answer, at first. Not until Jamie raises her head, finds her eyes far away, her jaw tense. 

“We don’t have to,” she says, too quickly, worried she’s already taken this fragile promise Dani has made to keep moving forward and broken it. Dani’s lips curve, her hand steady on the back of Jamie’s head. 

“Don’t think we should...plan anything,” she says. “But...something small. Something just-us. Yeah.”

It’s only right, they decide--not to throw a party or invite the masses in to this quiet life they’ve made, but to signal to the stars that they’ve _chosen_. They’ve decided, even if no one will ever know or care, upon one another. 

There is a park, not far from the shop, where Jamie has always felt a little closer to home than anywhere else. A little closer to the old world, the old her, where all that green overwrites the awareness that America is something of an invasive species. It seeps into the cracks, pushes up the concrete, makes itself known on the flattening of her syllables, the words traded thoughtlessly from her native slang to this new, unpolished form. America, stamping itself onto her life one year at a time--except in places like this park, with trees that block out the skyline, with flowers that grow where they will, life finding a path of its own. 

She’d dreamed, once upon a peaceful yesterday, of taking Dani here one day. A fantasy world, where Dani didn’t flinch from clocks and calendars, where Dani didn’t meet every “next year” with a knowing little smile. A fantasy life, where she might sink to one knee--or just turn her head in Dani’s lap, letting the sun kiss her skin--and say, “What d’you think of forever?”

She never would have. Never would have, even if Dani didn’t look at her with such miserable longing sometimes, that fear papered over her smile like the patching of a damaged wall. Dani’s relationship with commitment is particular, and difficult, and her own. That Dani was the one to ask, in the end, feels right. 

Jamie would never have asked--but here, at sunset, on a day in late summer, she thinks, _It’s still good. Here, where life is allowed to roam free as anything in this country ever can. It’s still right._

There is a gentle breeze, a light mist of evening rain, a dress Dani wears when she’s feeling particularly alive. A ring to match the one on Jamie’s finger. No officiant, no witness; only heads bowed together in a grove of trees, surrounded by flowers not quite white, not quite blooming under moonlight. Only Dani murmuring inches from her lips that she could stand here for the rest of time, and it would feel very much by design. Only Jamie, eyes open, unable to sacrifice even a second of Dani’s smile. 

There are promises whispered, and laughter muffled, and they do not miss the music. The dancing. The toasts. Later--much later--Jamie will look out over a crowded floor packed with champagne flutes and long dresses and she will think, _Ours was perfect. Ours fit._

They tell their friends of the engagement, of the potted plant and the promise. They do not tell them they are, in their hearts, as married as anyone ever needs to be. It is, like so many parts of a story written with two hands, theirs alone. And there will come a time where papers may be signed, where the America which has seeped into so many cracks will demand proof--and Jamie will give it, gladly, because it reassures Dani to see their names on that paper. It reassures Dani, to know there will be something left behind when she’s gone.

She will give that much, and she will accept Dani’s scrawl on the page, and she will know it doesn’t really matter. They already know. They’ve already known. 

Some stories do not need to be shared, to be true. 


	10. reflective - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: something about Dani's fear of mirrors and Jamie describing to her what she looks like when she needs so she won't have to look, and adding things like "you're beautiful", "you're gorgeous", etc

Dani’s distaste for mirrors is nothing new, by the time she begins turning her eyes away in earnest. “Habit,” Jamie remembers her saying apologetically, not six months in, when she’d shaken her head at an apartment Jamie had found perfectly pleasant. _Too many mirrors_ , she’d realized later--the closet, the bedroom door, the kitchen had all reflected their faces at every turn. Dani, not yet too haunted to breathe, unable to forget the year she’d spent striding stubbornly away from the gaze of a dead man, hadn’t been able to stomach the idea. 

Even so, she didn’t mind what she called a “normal person’s” use of mirrors. One in the bathroom; one set into the vanity in the corner of their room. Those had been acceptable, even useful, and Dani had said, “It’s not like _he’ll_ be there.”

The _anymore_ had gone unspoken.

The _don’t know what she’ll do_ had, as well.

She’d fallen slowly back into the groove of accepting her own reflection--to apply makeup, to brush her teeth, to glance at her outfit before leaving for the day--and if she’d done so with caution, if she’d flicked her gaze once, twice, to make sure only Jamie was ever beside her, that was fine. It hadn’t bothered Jamie in the least. She’s never been much for her own gaze staring back, either. 

“Didn’t even have one,” she said idly, the first time she’d seen Dani flinch. “In the old flat. Dunno if you noticed.”

Dani, who had seen the place exactly once, when Jamie had packed a single bag for the life they were setting out to begin, shook her head. Jamie shrugged. 

“Overrated, in my humble opinion.”

Dani had laughed, and she’d set about building back to _normal_ , and Jamie had watched her body language slowly smooth out. How she’d learned, over time, to check from the corner of her eye, forgetting to believe she’d find a monster in the glass. How she’d learned, even, to appreciate the finer things about a mirror: how it would warn her to Jamie slipping up from behind, lips on her neck, Dani laughing before Jamie’s hands could land on her hips. It had all been easy, for a while.

And then, as things do, normal had slipped sideways again. 

Dani, these days, doesn’t just flinch at the sight of a mirror. Her whole body seems to retract, her chin ducking against her chest, her breath freezing mid-swoop. She chokes, stumbling back, and no matter where they are--in the apartment, out to lunch, in a department store--Jamie is there to grasp her around the waist and turn her away. “No worries,” she hears herself say with the glittering good cheer of a lie. “No worries, let’s just--just go this way--”

_No worries_. Sure. No concern at all for the pale cast to Dani’s face, the way her eyes seem to stare out at something set back in time. No worries. 

“It’s--” Dani closes her eyes, frustration evident in every line of her face. “It’s _silly_ \--that I can’t--”

Jamie takes her by the hands, remembering a night years ago when she’d done this very same thing, when Dani had looked at her mouth with earnest desire, and everything had made a blistering sort of sense. “Nothing silly about you.”

“That I can’t _look_ ,” Dani presses on in a strangled voice. “That I-- _Jamie_.”

She only ever seems to say Jamie’s name this way, lately, this explicit way that drives at Jamie’s heart like a blow. There’s such a lack of hope in the syllables, when Dani says it like this, and Jamie wants to say, _Stop. Stop doing that. Say it like you do when I’m kissing you, or when I’ve pissed you off, or when you’ve lost in me a goddamn shop, but stop saying it like you’ve already surrendered._

She doesn’t say any of it. Instead, she says, “Tell me what you need to know.”

Dani, eyes closed, shakes her head. Jamie squeezes her hands, slides both arms around Dani’s body, holds firm until the gentle shivers subside. 

“Don’t need anything from a mirror I can’t give. C’mon. Try me.”

She watches the disbelief in Dani’s expression shift to exhaustion. “Just--my hair is--”

“Perfect,” Jamie interrupts. Dani cracks open one eye, frowning. “Seriously. S’all...shiny and wavy and distracting. What more could you want?”

Dani snorts out a laugh. Jamie, whose own hair is a perpetual mess, who seems to find more silver in among the brown with each passing week, grins. 

“Next.”

“Makeup,” Dani says, in a voice midway between fed-up and amused. Jamie takes her chin gently in one hand, making a show of tilting her head back and forth. 

“Eyes,” she says seriously, “perfect. Foundation, expert. Lipstick--”

“Don’t,” Dani says warningly, but she’s starting to grin. Jamie leans in, kisses her slowly, leans back again. 

“Little disheveled, if you want my honest word on the subject.”

Dani slumps into her, face pressed to Jamie’s neck. “Bet I look tired.”

“Nope.”

“Bet I look worn out--”

“Gorgeous,” Jamie proclaims. This much is never a lie. Dani’s face is now, has always been, the most perfect she’s ever seen. 

She feels the sigh go out of Dani, her shoulders hunched, her breath cool on Jamie’s skin. “You didn’t sign on for this.”

“Signed on for you,” Jamie says into the side of her head, into hair that is, in fact, still the best she’s ever laid eyes upon. “Whatever that means. Always.”

She’d thought, when the face in the glass had been younger and less weary and infinitely more foolish, this kind of devotion was an idiot’s game. A game played only to lose. She’d been so sure of it, that being this kind of invested in another human being was a special kind of lunacy. 

Now, with Dani breathing against her neck, Dani’s hands wound in her shirt, she thinks the only lunacy would be in walking away. In leaning back from this too-wonderful woman who fears a mirror is enough to break her. 

She knows, with patient certainty, that it will only get harder. That she’ll one day be the one smoothing blush into Dani’s cheeks, tipping her head back to apply mascara, helping wash her face clean at the end of the day. That there may come a time where Dani will be too tired and too averse to her own reflection to keep track of braiding her own hair, to keep up the pretense of a woman at war. She understands that this is not the sort of degradation which reverses--not by luck, not by prayer, not by stubbornness. 

And it doesn’t matter. She signed on for Dani. Whatever that looks like. Whatever it may mean down the line. 

“You’re sure I look all right?” Dani ventures, sounding almost too tired to care. Jamie kisses the side of her head again, holds her just a little bit tighter. 

“Most beautiful woman in the world, my wife.”


	11. twin thing - nell and luke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Nell and Luke are my favorite dynamic from Hill House so will you write a small fic about them and their connection?

She wishes the twin thing would work for _happy_ the way it does for _pain_. 

When they were little, it was different. When they were small, she hadn’t minded so much the connection’s tendency--the way it had stretched the bonds between them, tightening its grip to remind them _pain_ is the greatest of learning tools. It had only felt special, then--how her eyes had strained, despite doctors telling her mother, _I don’t know what to say. Her vision’s perfect_ , until Luke began blinking at the world through Coke bottle glasses. How her wrist would twinge, alerting her to Luke having fallen out of his treehouse, landing all forty-five pounds of him on his right arm. It had been a secret alarm bell in her head, a reminder that she and Luke, though separate, could never be pulled _too_ far apart. 

As they got older, she’d test the bounds of this secret connection, throwing stones against the window between herself and her brother. _Can you feel this?_ \--when she’d asked Theo to tickle her until the air left the room. _Or this?_ \--as she’d gulped down a milkshake, the sugar singing gleeful on her tongue. _How about this?_ \--the first time she’d been kissed, ten years old and dizzy with the there-and-gone press of someone else’s lips. 

_No_ , Luke always said, rubbing his nose, scratching his head, looking forlorn. She’d frowned, wondering if maybe only _she_ couldn’t line up the dominos. If maybe _Luke_ could send his joy as easily as his fear. 

Except she hadn’t known, the time Luke had been so proud of getting into the art fair in third grade, until he’d told her. 

Except she hadn’t known, the time Luke wolfed down half the Christmas cookies and tried to blame the dog, except for by the guilt in his eyes.

Except she hadn’t known, the first time he kissed someone--thirteen and clumsy, but so alive it was like flying--until he’d crept into the room they no longer shared and recounted the tale.

Not a one-way phone line, then. Just not how it works. 

The _pain_ , though. The pain is always there. Clear and crystal and sharp as a hailstorm, it comes. When she got into a car accident at seventeen, bruising her ribs, Luke had come sprinting up to the curb before she’d been able to call anyone. When Luke had slipped on the diving board in gym class, splitting his head open along the hairline, she’d developed a migraine bad enough to blur her vision. When she’d cut her hand making dinner. When he’d taken a beating after a bad card game. When she’d fallen down the stairs, when he’d had the worst hangover of his life, when she’d been so sick, she had feared herself pregnant. All the pain. All the illness. All the wretched agony the world has to offer--they take it, together. A twin thing. 

She remembers--in the distant dreamscape where she keeps all memory of Olivia Crain--her mother murmuring to her father once. _I know it’s crazy, but they’ve always been like this. She cried while he was getting his shots, the whole time; he went perfectly silent when she had that fever, you remember the one._ It had been something of a relief, to know someone else could see it. That the magic, if visible to her mother’s eye, was _real_. 

Every broken bone. Every shattering headache. Every instance of stomach flu. They feel it together.

When her heart breaks open, spilling all manner of hope onto the floor, she waits for his call. When she has dragged herself to the phone, dialed the appropriate numbers--the EMT there and gone before she can so much as blink--she waits for his call. When the silence of a house that was intended for a family, for a dog, for a _life_ presses in around her hard enough to hurt, she waits for his call. 

_A twin thing_ , she thinks numbly. It works for pain, always. Only the pain, maybe. Never the good. Never the glory of a first _I love you_ , the dreamlike haze of a marriage proposal, the giddy skidding laughter of that first night under this roof sharing the same last name. Never that. But the pain? The pain is always true. The pain will always reach across the miles to rap on his door. 

_I feel yours_ , she thinks. When he slips off the wagon. When his withdrawals become too much to bear. When he’s punched in the face, when his knuckles split open in retaliation, when he’s scraping for air and can’t quite find it. _I feel yours every fucking time._

It’s the first beat of rage she’s ever allowed herself, hastily swallowed. Hastily banished. He is Luke. He is _Luke_. There is a line, golden and unyielding and permanent, strung between them. A twin thing. 

She leans her head back against the wall, feeling exposed, feeling shattered, and waits. He’ll call. He has to.

It’s a twin thing. 


	12. vulnerable - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: a ficlet where it is Dani who consoles Jamie and makes sure she feels safe. Maybe something stirred up from her past that makes her upset or something

Jamie likes to pretend she doesn’t have nightmares. She likes, too, to pretend she is a sound sleeper--like Dani doesn’t catch sight of her face in the night, the flutter of eyelashes that says she is awake and listening for Dani to come back to bed after a trip to the bathroom. Jamie likes to pretend an awful lot of things where vulnerability is concerned, and Dani doesn’t feel as though she’s in any position to judge.

Some nights, though, there is no denying fact. Some nights, the horrors of her own nighttime reveries are bumped out of place by the ones spilling over into Jamie’s. 

She is, each time, quiet. So quiet, Dani almost doesn’t notice the way she shifts along the mattress, pushing out of Dani’s loose grasp, edging toward the last measure of safety the bed has to offer before dumping her out onto the floor. She makes not a sound, save for short gasps, as though she’s been trying to hold her breath for too long. As though she’s been trying to make herself invisible to whatever monster might have crawled out from under the bed. 

The first night, Dani made the mistake of touching her--of tracing a hand up her back with well-intentioned gentleness, just to remind Jamie, _I’m here. It’s me. It’s all right._ It was a trick that had always worked on Flora, on kids she’d babysat for as a teenager: _You aren’t alone; nothing is going to get you._

Jamie, to her surprise, had jerked so violently away, she really _had_ fallen out of bed. Landing in a sprawl on the hotel room floor, she’d curled herself into a ball, arms wrapped around her knees, and shivered there for almost two minutes before Dani could coax her back to waking. 

“Sorry,” she’d mumbled, so heartily humiliated, Dani hadn't had the stomach to ask. She’d only helped Jamie to her feet, eased her back into bed, assuming they’d talk about it in the morning.

They didn’t. Jamie, come sunrise, had been out of bed and dressed before Dani could wake. Her face had been all bright, all smile, all _didn’t happen, Poppins, and I’ll deny it if you bring it up._ Dani hadn’t dared.

Now, when it happens--maybe once every two or three weeks, when rain lashes the windows and the winds outside are high--she doesn't try to touch Jamie. She only waits, perfectly awake, perfectly separate from Jamie’s huddled frame in a small bed, for the shivers to level out. Waits for the moment, usually defined by Jamie rolling onto her back, when Jamie will come to her. Jamie’s hand groping across the blankets to grasp Dani’s shirt, or fingers, or the band of her underwear. This moment, silent and desperate, is the first sign Dani is allowed back in.

“Do you...” Her voice is too loud, even at a whisper. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Jamie winces, brow tightening, eyes stubbornly closed. Her grip tightens. 

“I think--think you should,” Dani presses softly. “Jamie. This happens--”

“S’all right,” Jamie mumbles. “S’nothing.”

It isn’t. Dani can tell _nothing_ from a private violence, maybe better than anyone. It isn’t nothing, because this is the only time she ever sees Jamie like this. The only time Jamie ever hunches into herself and shakes like a child in a thunderstorm. 

“Can I do anything?” she asks, when it becomes clear Jamie isn’t going to open up. Not yet. Maybe she will, someday--when there are more than a couple of months, a handful of rented cars, the precious novelty of exploring something utterly fresh between them. Jamie will tell her, maybe, in the same way she’d told the rest of her story: at a moment unexpected, a moment designed by Jamie’s hand, when she’d been able to bear the strain. 

For now, Jamie simply stretches out on her back, eyes shut, fingers grinding the bones of Dani’s hand together. 

“Just--remind me,” she says at last, in a voice too sturdy to be sleep-addled. 

“Of what?”

“That I'm not--” Jamie stops, clenching her jaw in the dark. Dani rolls toward her, hesitant, laying a hand on her cheek only when Jamie leans toward her touch. “That I’m here. That no one else is.”

“No one,” Dani confirms. “C’ept me. I can--I can do a sweep, if you want--”

Jamie pulls at her with graceless fingers, pulls until Dani is holding her flush against her own body. Each shaky drift of Jamie’s breath is haggard, just this side of a sob. 

Later, Dani thinks, she’ll have stories--of foster parents, or unvarnished childhood monsters, or prison. Stories of girls who cut her open, of men who kicked at her ribs, of a life painted with too many bruises to count. Later, Dani thinks, she may hear them all, one by one or in a single dose, a reckless retelling of an old play whose lines Jamie can’t forget.

Now, in a hotel room, with Jamie’s skin under her lips, Jamie’s trembling soothed by her hands, she doesn’t think it matters. Nightmares don’t care to be explained away. Their only resolution is this: the reminder that the daylight can burn away even the darkest shadows. The reminder that a hand held tight can ward off the worst of the fear. 

They won’t talk about it, come morning. Jamie already believes she is meant to hold Dani up, to fend off Dani’s shadows. Jamie has not yet figured out what Dani has: that this battle will only work long-term if they stand united, back to back, equal in support of every kind. 

Jamie, for now, thinks she has to play hero. That she has to keep her demons to herself, her gaze fixed firmly on Dani’s. Jamie, for now, can believe that. 

And on nights like this, when she’s ready, Dani will be waiting--for her to move across a tiny mattress, her hand needy, her eyes shut tight. Dani doesn’t mind. There are all manner of ways to ward off the night. 


	13. second first - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Dani and Jamie's second time. Or first time post Bly/post "do you want company?"

It’s not planned. Not that the first time was a _plan_ , Jamie thinks. The first time was less a plan, more a tumble--a leap--a decision. _You’ve shown me yours, it’s only fair_ , she’d thought, with the dizzy exhilaration of making a choice you might very well regret come morning. Dani had spent so much time walking through the dark alone, not a hand to grab, not a light to shine. It had only seemed right, for Jamie to meet her halfway. 

And tumble they had--into Dani’s bed, into this thing Jamie hadn’t been looking for, but hadn’t quite been able to look away from, either. They’d fallen onto the mattress, every move fresh and new and exhilarating. Jamie hadn’t done this in years; Dani, not at all. And there had been something to it, something nearly immaculate that Jamie had almost felt unworthy of--the way Dani muffled laughter against her skin, the nervous skid of her voice pressed into Jamie’s neck as she’d stood there in jeans and damp hair. It had been soft, and careful, Dani gently folding her jumper and setting it aside, Jamie stretching every new beat out as long as she could stand until it was clear--more than clear, _certain_ \--that Dani was ready for the next. 

It had been lovely, and almost simple, and for all the nerves in the world, it had felt like stepping into the light for the first time.

And then, not a day later, everything changed. Change is _good_ , Jamie knows; organic and expected, even if not exactly predictable. Change is _right_ , Jamie knows; a world without change isn’t natural. Still, she’d thought--hoped, maybe foolishly--that they’d get time before the change swept in. That it would be a gentle shift over months or even years, rather than a sudden assertion of new facts. 

Facts like: there are things in the world neither of them are prepared to handle.

Facts like: those things have grabbed hold of Dani in ways Jamie can’t reach.

Facts like: even now, outside the gravity of the manor and the life they’d begun there, the shadows are darker than she could ever have comprehended.

Truths, every last one, and Jamie has never been one to argue against truth. The world is set by laws and regulations--one season drifts into the next, the weather speaks for itself, no one can stop the spread of roots beneath the earth. These are good things, true things, rational things she has based her adult life around. 

And still, she wishes. Wishes she could have had more time with Dani’s nervous skidding laughter. More time sitting back, her favorite shirt on the floor, watching with amusement as Dani gently folds her own top and sets it aside. More time making it all as easy as she can for Dani to learn. 

Instead, they’re _both_ learning--and it’s not the kind of thing any past relationship can prepare for. Not for the way Dani disappears into her own reflection sometimes, gazing for hours into the passenger mirror as though unable to keep her eyes from searching for something Jamie can’t see. Not for the quiet uncertainty of Dani’s smile, so unlike the bright, hopeful expression she’d worn when Jamie had kissed her that night. They can’t prepare for eyes that change color without warning, for beasts lurking unseen, for a promise made without fully understanding the consequences. 

They can’t prepare. But they can walk into it together. That matters. 

At first, Dani hadn’t seemed to want to touch her. Or hadn’t seemed _able_ to touch her, maybe; she’d hugged herself close, put her hands in her pockets, kept her distance. But, slowly--as they’d made their way through England, as they’d bought plane tickets and planned for adventure across the pond--that had dissolved. Slowly, she’d come back. One day at a time, a little nearer. Brushing Jamie’s hand on the flight over. Her shoulder pressed lightly to Jamie’s in the car rental office. Her body sliding past in a hotel room.

Small touches. Glancing, testing, experimental touches. Nothing big. Nothing like what they’d already uncorked in a bedroom back in Bly. 

The weeks unfold, and every night, Dani curls a little closer. Sometimes, Jamie finds herself unable to sleep at all, with Dani’s head on her chest. Sometimes, it feels so much like playing champion that she feels too small, too fragile, unworthy of the honor. Dani, groaning in her sleep, clutching at Jamie’s shirt like she’s in danger of sliding away, seems not to notice. Dani is fighting her own battles, and she’s doing so without letting Jamie so much as hand her a weapon. 

The weeks unfold, and the air between them seems ever to tighten. Every time Dani catches her eye and holds. Every time Dani takes her hand without looking. Every time Dani stands, swaying, her body leaning forward as she had in a hallway once upon a lifetime ago. 

And still: nothing. Jamie doesn’t push. Jamie can’t bear to see the crease in Dani’s brow, the flinch from an unexpected touch. Dani is not fragile, she is sure; Dani Clayton is still so much stronger than either of them could have imagined, she knows. Still. Still, she can’t be the thing to break any part of Dani open. 

Dani has to come to her. 

And, without plan, without intent, Dani does.

They’ve been on the road for almost a month, two people learning one another without the easy fall-back of sexual intimacy. It is unlike any relationship Jamie’s ever had--though, in fairness, she supposes she figured that out about Dani before she even knew they’d wind up here. Before she could even _guess._ Dani has always been different. 

In a past life, she would be building the blocks of their future on physical touch. On hands sliding into clothes, on lips tracing and tongues tasting. She understands that much very well--that a person can give so much up without meaning to, can have so many trunks unlocked by simple virtue of getting naked. It’s easy, watching people, learning what they need. Easy, if you’re willing to pay attention. 

But it’s easy, in its own way, learning Dani this way, too. Learning how she leans into uptempo pop-rock, and turns up her nose at twangy folk-country. Learning how she claims not to be hungry, only to steal half the food off of Jamie’s plate. Learning how to read the serious cast of her eyes when she’s thinking, how it’s different from the purse of her lips when she’s about to spiral into panic. It’s easy in every way, as she’d never expected it to be. 

Except for this. Except for the electricity. She can’t for her life find a way to read that--because it’s _always_ there. Always between them, this intangible heat springing up at a moment’s notice. One minute, they’re laughing--Jamie bending to pat a retriever who has bounded across the park to make a new friend, Dani chatting idly with the middle-aged woman apologizing for the dog’s exuberance--and then: 

Then it’s like they’re back there, back at Bly, back in that bedroom. Back with Jamie’s arm looped gently around Dani’s waist, Dani’s hands framing her face, all warm breath and lips not quite touching. That same heat, that same lightning-in-a-bottle irresistibility, punching up between them. 

It’s in every shop, the aisles so slender, they find themselves pressing tight as they inspect wares. In every diner, Dani leaning nearly out of her seat into some unseen gravity Jamie can’t seem to help producing. In every hotel room. 

Every single hotel room.

_It’s hers_ , Jamie thinks, even as her heart pounds and her fingertips seem to go numb with anticipation. _It has to be hers._ Dani’s choice. Dani’s willingness to, once again, tumble with her into something new. 

_It’s hers_ , even as Dani seems to burn on the other side of a bathroom door Jamie has left cracked open while she showers. Dani’s choice. Dani’s willingness to want this with her, for her own reasons, and not simply because they’ve done it once before.

_It’s hers_ , even as Jamie slides into bed with the quiet uncertainty of yet another night not _quite_ there. Not quite ready. Dani’s choice. Dani’s willingness to set aside the thing she insists is watching her, waiting to pull her under. 

The air seems especially fraught tonight, somehow--she thinks maybe it’s the August of it all, pushing in through the cracks in the windows. August in the American Midwest is hotter than she anticipated, a deeper heat than she’s felt in a long time. There’s a thick quality to the humidity she doesn’t like, and she finds herself wishing for the affectionate chill of autumn. 

Especially now, with Dani stretched out beside her on the sheets. It’s too hot for much; Dani had looked almost apologetic, stepping out of the bathroom in a long t-shirt and underwear. Jamie, who’d spent the previous night tossing and turning in an ill-advised pair of sweatpants, tried to look easy shrugging. 

“S’too bloody hot for anything else, right?”

There had been relief in Dani’s eyes, but slipping between the sheets had felt like stepping into a house without turning on the lights. The air is simply too heavy to be allowed. The bed is simply too small. 

Dani is simply too close and too far at the same time. 

_It has to be her_ , Jamie thinks again, a constant mantra against her own desires. It’s a personal doctrine, a requirement. _It has to be--_

Dani is breathing in the dark, slow, hitching breaths that sound almost like a nightmare. She’s laying on her side, facing Jamie, two people curled not quite to meeting, and every time Jamie opens her eyes--Dani is gazing back. In the dark, it’s hard to make out the mismatched colors. In the dark, she can almost believe both of those eyes are still blue. 

Dani, breathing deeply. Saying nothing. But one hand, Jamie realizes, is moving. One hand, drifting almost like a dream, resting lightly along Jamie’s hip. 

She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t close her eyes. Only shifts, slowly, her legs straightening against the warm rustle of stiff sheets. Dani’s hand remains where it is, a fixed spot in a room which seems suddenly to be adrift. 

Jamie, slowly, raises a hand to match. A light brush of fingers, curling around until Dani exhales and lets her own body inch nearer.

Dani, who seems so far and so _impossibly_ close. 

_Has to be_ , Jamie thinks, the only words coming to mind as the hand on her hip drifts up, slowly sliding along her ribs. Dani’s palm is warm, her fingers trembling, slipping up under the cotton t-shirt. She rests there, halfway up a ribcage which seems suddenly too brittle to hold the crash of Jamie’s heart, waiting. 

Jamie, slowly, matches her. 

This will be, she is sure, as far as it goes. Dani is pushing her own boundaries tonight in ways Jamie hasn’t let herself even think about, but it’s so hot, and the air is so heavy, and there is simply no way--

Dani’s legs, bare and smooth, are brushing her own. She drags in a breath, aware Dani can feel it beneath her hand, and can’t find it in herself to be embarrassed. Not with the way Dani is curling closer, the bed--already so small--shrinking to nearly nothing. 

Dani, who has been close, but hasn’t looked at her quite like _this_ in weeks. Dani, who has been so distracted by her own reflection, by the monster she senses beneath the waves. Dani, who seems now, for the first time since leaving England, to see only her. 

“We don’t have to,” Jamie hears herself breathe. “We don’t--”

Dani makes a noise: maybe a laugh, maybe a bid for silence. Her hand is sliding higher, her fingers tracing the underside of Jamie’s breast with the barest contact. Jamie swallows the next words, her own hand flexing in response. 

Dani is nearly on her pillow, she realizes. Her head lifts slightly, her eyes searching Jamie’s, and there is a moment where Jamie thinks, _She’ll run now. She’ll flinch back. She’ll do it again, and it will_ hurt _again, and there’s nothing I can--_

Dani is kissing her, and if Jamie had feared a loss here--if Jamie had feared Dani might forget how to do this, or how to want her--there is no point entertaining that fear any longer. Not with Dani’s lips pressing gently once, twice, then _harder_. Dani, banishing the rest of the distance in a single fluid motion, sliding across the mattress and pressing Jamie down onto her back. 

It is not planned, she can tell--from the heady breath catching in Dani’s chest, from the dark glaze in Dani’s eyes as she gazes down at her. Dani is as surprised as she is, even pressing her body down, her hips rocking against Jamie’s almost accidentally. A flush rises in Dani’s cheeks, her lip pulling between her teeth. 

Jamie nods. Words, she senses, will break the spell--whatever it is Dani needs to do here, to prove to herself here, does not need words. Consent, though. Consent requested and freely given. That much feels right.

Dani presses down to kiss her again, even as Jamie is arching up to meet her, and it isn’t gentle this time. Isn’t easy and slow and stretched carefully out, each beat elongated until crashing hearts can level into something sustainably enthusiastic. This is a month of waiting, a month of electricity, the sweat-slide of muggy August air pressing down around them. This is Dani leaning out of the grip of whatever she most fears and into the desire she’s been fostering since a kiss in a greenhouse. 

This is Dani’s hand’s exploring, her fingers in Jamie’s hair, tracing Jamie’s jawline, pulling Jamie’s shirt up over her head. This is Dani’s mouth at her ear, gasping in surprise when Jamie’s hands close around her hips and jerk her down against one bent thigh. This is Dani rolling to meet her, one hand fumbling beneath her waistband, fingers searching and finding and stroking until Jamie’s breath is a hot spike in her chest. 

It’s the kissing, she thinks, she’s missed most. No one has ever kissed her like Dani does--not like a secret to be hidden away, or a private scorn to look back on later, or even a hot glee no one should ask to understand. Dani kisses like she wants to be here. Dani kisses like she never wants to be anywhere else. Dani kisses her in this hotel, in this bed, with her fingers curling and her hips grinding mercilessly, with exactly the same excitement as in a hallway--in a grove--in a greenhouse. Every time, no matter what Dani Clayton carries, she kisses the same way. 

She believes, in some part of her, that Dani will build those walls again when her hands have finished their pleasing work. That Dani will roll off of her, lay on her back, stare blankly at the ceiling as she waits for her beast to rise up. 

Dani doesn’t. Dani makes soft, urgent noises against her upturned jaw, kissing and sighing as Jamie’s back bows off the mattress, and Jamie has barely found equilibrium again--legs trembling, hands buried in Dani’s hair--when she slides not off, but down. Down the mattress, kicking aside useless sheets, dragging the underwear off Jamie’s hips as she goes.

“You don’t have to,” Jamie begins, but Dani is looking at her around the almost leisurely kisses she trails down a shivering body, just _looking_ at her as her mouth explores still-new territory, and Jamie sees no point in arguing. Not with the way Dani is sliding half off the small bed, her hands insistent and hopeful as they guide Jamie’s legs up over her shoulders. 

No words, Jamie decides again, letting herself sink into Dani’s kiss. Letting herself rock against Dani in slow, easy rhythm, she grips the sheet in one hand and Dani’s hair in the other, guiding her with gentle pressure. Dani hadn’t done this, the first night. Dani had, in fact, spent much of that night on her back, shivering all over with excitement and trepidation and pleasure. _Teach me_ , she’d said in a voice half-shy, half-brazen, and Jamie had complied with the joy of one who knows this kind of education can take a lifetime. 

_Teach me_ , Dani had said then, but now, it seems to be a different instruction. _Let me_ , maybe. _Let me learn. Let me want this._

_Far be it from me_ , Jamie thinks dazedly; her mind may worry about going too far, about pushing Dani out of her comfort zone, but her body is familiar with this ride. Her body is all too delighted to find Dani picking up the signals of what she likes, Dani testing with soft kiss and rough lick to find what works best. 

And maybe now, Jamie thinks with a mind wiped nearly blank, Dani will pull away. Maybe now, Dani will vanish on her without warning. Maybe.

Except, no--Dani is curling against her once more, one thigh draped over Jamie’s hips, moving against her with slow, indulgent thrusts. Her hand curls around Jamie’s shoulder, her breath coming in fast little puffs as she picks up speed, and it’s all Jamie can do not to flip her over and take the wheel. All she can do, to curl her fingers around Dani’s thigh, digging in as Dani presses against her, slides away, presses against her. It does not feel, she recognizes, as though Dani is trying to reach a conclusion of her own. It feels only as though Dani is desperate to feel her, to keep herself present, to make absolutely certain neither of them can forget she is in this bed. 

_No chance of that_ , thinks Jamie, weariness and arousal making the strangest bedfellows. All night, Dani could keep this up--all night, with sweat running down her back, with her lips tracking every inch of Jamie’s skin, drawing her tight and shattering her control. She wouldn’t mind. It’s too hot to sleep, anyway. 

“Okay,” Dani says, her voice half a coiled groan, as she eases a hand down to tease at Jamie once more. “We’re okay. We’re here.”

“We are,” Jamie agrees, turning her head, kissing Dani with what she hopes is all the long, steady promise of a bedroom and an offer to keep company. Whatever that means. For however long Dani wants. “We are absolutely fine.”

For the first time, she’s pretty sure they both believe it.


	14. swipe right - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Online Dating AU - meeting online and being from bad past relationship.

This is probably a bad idea. It is, isn’t it? Almost certainly.

Why is she _here_?

Dani Clayton has been playing this particular set of thoughts--bad idea, terrible idea, _why would you do this?_ \--on repeat for three days. Ever since setting up that dating profile. Ever since realizing there isn’t much use in setting up a dating profile if you’re not going to use it. 

Oh, it’s all fun and games, building the thing. Find a photo that accentuates all the best parts of your face--Dani, after an hour of careful consideration, wound up going with one that accentuated her _hair_ , more than anything, but she suspects the same idea counts. Then, the profile. What do you like? _Teaching, long walks, new experiences, bad coffee._ What _don’t_ you like? 

_Men_ , she’d thought, and snorted aloud into her wine before settling on: _Deep water, accordion music, expectations, being called Danielle._

A little more flourish, tipsy keystrokes, a casually-framed short-version of her life. Perfect. And then...well, then you hit the publish button, don’t you? You decide, for better or worse, to jump off this diving board and see just how far you can stand to swim before the energy gives out on you.

The faces appearing before her hadn’t been _bad_ , certainly. Pretty, most of them. Interesting, a few. Still, she hadn’t swiped right on any--once or twice, because she’d forgotten which way meant _yes please_ , but mostly because no one seemed quite...right. Which, she’d thought, was silly. The whole point of an app like this is to cast as many nets as possible and see what comes up. The whole point is to have _fun_. 

But every time she’d hovered over a promising image, a woman who likes dogs, or plays the violin, or goes rock-climbing in her spare time, she’d thought of him. Eddie. Who had taken one _yes_ to a single date, and tried to make a whole life with her out of it. 

Eddie, who had taken her two decades to pull away from. 

What if the women here were the same? Not _Eddie_ , exactly, but--presumptive. What if they believed a swipe-right was as good as a marriage proposal? What if she got bound up in conversation, and then a date, and then a relationship with someone else who just didn’t _fit_ right?

Left. Left. Left. 

And then: the mistake.

She hadn’t _meant_ to swipe right. Exactly. She hadn’t _planned_ , maybe is the better way of putting it, on swiping right. She’d only wanted to look at the woman’s profile a little longer. Only wanted to inspect the facets this woman had put out on display with almost resigned simplicity. 

Some people, Dani had by now realized, wrote poetry and paragraphs to describe themselves. 

Jamie Taylor had bullet points.

“Gardener. English. Likes: Plants. Stories. Tea. Dislikes: Bullshit.”

The end. That had been quite literally the sum of it. Gardener. English. No bullshit.

But the picture, somehow, Dani hadn’t been able to look away from. Not because of carefully-arranged lighting, not because of a curated model-clean image--but because the woman appeared to have posted the photo almost under duress. It came in profile, as though someone else had done the job, her head turned toward the camera as if interrupted. Her hands were buried in a flower pot. Her clothes were simple--a tank top, a silver chain resting against the jut of collarbones, a pair of worn-looking jeans with holes in the knees. Her eyes--some fascinating color Dani couldn’t quite place--looked somewhere between amused and irritated. 

She looked real. 

_Stupid_ , Dani thinks now--because that was probably the idea, wasn’t it? This woman, Jamie, had _planned_ to look exactly this way. Real. Vexed at the idea of putting herself out there. Reluctantly available. 

It was a ploy, certainly--but one that seems to be working, because not only did Dani accidentally-not-accidentally swipe right, she found herself _texting_ the woman. For hours. She’d expected much less, had figured this Jamie person would be as brief in text as she had been in bio, but...

Jamie had talked to her. Willingly. Teasingly, with more humor than truth, maybe, but with no sign at all that she was sick of Dani’s questions, bad jokes, nervous assessment that _I really don’t do this, I honestly don’t get it._

_I don’t, either_ , Jamie had replied, and that had felt like enough of a reason to keep testing the waters. Enough of a reason to keep the conversation going back and forth, back and forth, until nearly two in the morning.

_Shit_ , she’d said. _I need to be at work in four hours._

_Shame_ , Jamie had replied, her tone already searingly familiar over text. _Own your own business, make your own hours. Far wiser approach._

_I’ll make a note of it for when I found an elementary school_ , Dani had replied, laughing. She hadn’t said she’d already been in bed for an hour, the phone resting on the pillow beside her head so she wouldn’t miss the buzz of a new message. It had seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, with wine-warmed blood and the happy haze of good conversation. Jamie made her laugh. Jamie put her at ease. Jamie might not have been real, but she _felt_ real, and that was _good_. 

Better than anything she’d felt in years, if she was honest with herself. 

Still, when the next day had come and gone with no message, she’d thought, _Fair enough._ Jamie had been good virtual company for one night. It was more than she’d expected to get out of this app.

Far more than she’d expected, particularly when Thursday night rolled around and her phone buzzed.

_Teacher, yeah? No school on Saturday?_

_Correct_ , Dani had replied, as amused by the out-of-left-field text as she was irritated with how her stomach had flipped over upon receiving it. _You have figured out the complexity of the American school system._

_I am a genius_ , Jamie sent back, followed quickly by: _Drinks tomorrow night?_

Drinks. A thing that people do. A thing that adult people do for _date_ reasons. 

_She isn’t real_ , she’d thought, even as her thumb was punching back: _How’s 8? Miller’s?_

A mistake. Definitely a mistake. Because the app had been a lark, and the conversation had been too easy, and the fact that she can’t _quite_ pick out the colors in Jamie’s eyes from a single photo is making her crazier than she’d like to admit. 

A mistake, saying yes. A mistake, suggesting the local pub-like establishment around the corner, whose beer-and-burger specials had kept her fed on too many evenings spent working late. A mistake, because once this goes south--as it’s absolutely bound to, as _everything_ Eddie-shaped always has--she’s going to lose her favorite hangout in the deal, too.

And yet: here she is. Standing at the door, wondering if the outfit chosen for the evening festivities--tight jeans, pink blouse, hoop earrings--is too much or not nearly enough. 

_What am I doing here?_

Maybe, she thinks with mingled alarm and hope, she won’t even have showed up. Maybe it’s all part of the ruse: look approachable, look human and normal, look a little too beautiful in the most grounded way possible--then, cheerfully, invite a woman to drinks and just don’t show. A fun story for whoever comes next. _Can you believe she thought I’d want to meet her after one night of texting?_

“Dani?” 

_English_ , Dani thinks with a sudden rush of heat. _Right._ Somehow, she hadn’t quite been prepared for the accent, which--coming out of this woman, draped with languid ease at a table--is truly a little more than Dani thinks she can handle just now. The accent, combined with the mess of curls dragged back from her face, and a dress sense that manages to be both casual and deeply attractive at the same time, is...

“Jamie,” she says, her voice a little lower, a little more hoarse, than is truly necessary. The woman pushes up from her seat, a small-framed figure in a black button-down, suspenders, ripped jeans. She’s pressing a hand toward Dani, offering a firm shake as though they are business partners, not an off-the-cuff bad idea of a date. “You look--”

“Never been here before,” Jamie says, almost apologetically. She gestures for Dani to sit before dropping back down in a sprawl that implies exactly the opposite of what her mouth is insisting. “Wasn’t sure about the, ah, dress code.”

“You--you did fine,” Dani tells her, wishing suddenly she’d gone for a dress. Or a different human body altogether. She feels too tightly-strung, too anxious for the easy smile on Jamie’s lips. “Um. You’re very. In person.”

“Very,” Jamie repeats, a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “Is very American for _wish I’d gone left, after all_?”

“ _No._ No. Absolutely not. That.” Bit too forceful, she suspects, judging by the smile spreading into a grin. “No, it’s just--your picture didn’t--tell me you’d be so...”

“Clean?” Jamie suggests innocently. She raises her hands, wiggling her fingers in a small wave. “Scrub up fine, when I need to. Seemed to call for it.”

“And you...sure did answer,” Dani says stupidly. “The. Call, I mean. I’m sorry, I really don’t do this often.”

Something seems to soften in Jamie, her smile less teasing as she leans across the table. “Hey, no worries here. Same person you were talking to the other night.”

Dani nods, embarrassed, and flags down a server. Drinks ordered, she draws in a deep breath.

“I mean, I haven’t done this in years. Or. Ever, I guess.”

“A first date?” Jamie asks. When Dani doesn’t answer, she adds in a knowing tone, “A date with a woman?”

“Both,” Dani says honestly. “My last relationship was--well, I mean, we were engaged--”

Jamie whistles under her breath, reaching up to scratch her head. “Blimey. What happened?”

“He’s...him.” It’s too much to go into on a first date, too much to explain, even though talking to Jamie over text had been so dangerously easy. “My best friend growing up, but that was...growing up.”

Jamie nods thoughtfully, tilting her chin in thanks when the server deposits two full pint glasses and a basket of fries on the table. “Rough time, sounds like. I can relate. My last relationship also did not go well.”

“Was he also a man who thought you’d be all too happy to quit your job and take care of a bunch of babies?” Dani asks, perhaps a little too bitterly for the occasion. Jamie flashes another grin, sipping her drink.

“She was a woman who thought I’d be all too happy to take the fall when she got busted for possession.”

Dani gapes. “Oh. Oh--I didn’t know--I’m so--”

Jamie shrugs. “She wasn’t wrong. I was nineteen, and deeply stupid. Live and learn, as the poets say.”

“Which poets?” Dani asks, smiling a little. Jamie’s brow furrows.

“John...Lennon, possibly? Hard to say. Anyway, relationships are a chore and a half, but the greatest people in the world tell me thirty is too old to play musical bedframes, so. Here we are.”

_No bullshit_ , thinks Dani approvingly. For what little she’d put into her profile, Jamie evidently hadn’t been lying about that.

“You haven’t been in a relationship since you were nineteen?”

“In my mind, I was still in the relationship at twenty-four, when they let me out. She didn’t agree. Found out she’d been married two years, by then.” Something darkens in Jamie’s eyes for a moment. She sighs. “Like I said. Not my finest. But I am, as they say, a shining beacon of reform these days.”

“Now, when you say _they_ ,” Dani teases, grinning. Jamie nods decisively. 

“John Lennon. Definitively.”

_There it is_ , thinks Dani, watching Jamie pop a fry into her mouth. There, the easy roll of conversation from the other night. As though they’ve known each other forever. As though two people who have thus far failed irrevocably at relationships make a perfect match.

_Easy_ , she thinks. _Don’t go wild, now._

“So,” she says, when the comfortable silence between them has grown a bit too comfortable for the setting, “who are the greatest people in the world? The ones who tell you thirty is too old for...did you say _musical bedframes_?”

Jamie laughs. The ring of it curls gently around Dani’s head like a soft hand, a sound she’ll find herself replaying later with a skipping heart. 

“Not many willing to put up with a grump of my caliber, but Hannah and Owen fight the good fight. So long as I at least pretend to try.”

“Let me guess. They set up the account for you?”

Jamie makes a _sort of_ gesture in the air with the hand not holding her glass. “Threatened to bury me in puns and children, respectively, if I kept putting it off. Owen’s still grumpy about the photo choice.”

“I liked it,” Dani says without thinking. Jamie raises an eyebrow.

“Well, you did swipe as much. Mind if I ask why?”

_Walked into this one._ Still, she doesn’t mind as much as she probably should, not with the genuine curiosity in Jamie’s eyes. “You looked--don’t laugh.”

“No promises,” Jamie says, but with the gentle tone of one who knows exactly how much to tease before it’ll hurt. The idea warms Dani in a way she’s not quite ready to look at yet.

“You looked real,” Dani says. “Like you weren’t going to play games, or waste anyone’s time. Like you just wanted to be happy in peace.”

“That is,” Jamie says, holding out a fry for Dani to take, “sort of the idea, yeah.”

There’s an almost puzzled cast to her smile, like she didn’t entirely expect this answer, and is pleased by it at the same time. That same sense from the photo sweeps over Dani now--that this woman is authentic, even if she’s not always shiny, that she’s kind even if not entirely clean. That she doesn’t have any interest in muddled expectation or living a comfortable lie.

“And me?” Dani asks. She doesn’t entirely mean to--but she’s sure, in asking, that Jamie will answer. Jamie is unlike anyone else she’s ever met, the first person she’s ever known to meet each question head-on. 

“Honestly?”

Dani nods. Jamie seems to consider it, turning it over in her head as she twists a fry between her fingers like a cigarette. 

“All of it.”

“That’s,” Dani begins to laugh, “that’s not--”

“No,” Jamie says, and she isn’t smiling, exactly. Her eyes have a sort of shine Dani likes very much, but there is no hint of teasing in them now. “Really. All of it. You’re...very pretty, and that’s--but the way you described yourself. Like you didn’t care to be anyone in particular. You like new experiences, and bad coffee. You hate being called Danielle. I...I wanted to know why.”

“It’s not my name,” Dani says simply. Jamie gives a brief laugh, her hand moving across the table to lightly brush Dani’s fingertips. 

“I wanted to know why _all_ of it. Why do you like bad coffee--”

“It’s the only kind I know how to make,” Dani says automatically. “Just sort of leaned into it.”

“--and teaching--”

“I want to make a difference,” Dani says. 

“--and where you most like to go on those long walks--”

“Anywhere I can breathe,” Dani says. Her fingers are hesitant, tracing the tips of Jamie’s. There’s something electric about this, about barely touching, about barely _knowing_ someone and still wanting to give them neatly-packaged secrets shaped like the mundane. 

Jamie is smiling. “See, _that_. I like that. All of it.”

_It’s nothing_ , Dani thinks reflexively. A collection of details. A sparse approximation of a life. Eddie knows all of this, and then some, and never matched up to knowing _her_.

But this woman, leaning across the table with one hand outstretched, looks so different. Watches her with steady interest. Is _listening_ to every word Dani says, though the bar is growing crowded around them, and soon, conversation will become a task instead of a gift.

“Would you,” Dani says, feeling certain that some mistakes are not as bad as they seem, “like to take one of those walks?”

“Tonight?” 

“Yeah. Tonight.” Emboldened by the smile, by the curl falling into Jamie’s eyes, by the knowledge that she still can’t quite make out what color those eyes are, Dani takes her hand. It’s so easy, she thinks she could do it even without looking. “Right now.”

No bullshit, she thinks. No expectations. Just Jamie looking at her like she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. Dani can’t blame her. This isn’t at all what she’d thought she was getting, walking in tonight. 

But there’s something about it--something about the feeling that she’s been here before, or should be here forever, or will always find her way back to a woman who looks at her just like _this_ \--that almost makes her feel brave. Almost makes her feel _wonderful._ She rises from the table, laying cash beneath her half-empty glass, and feels a pleasant jolt in her chest when Jamie follows without another word.

If this a mistake, she thinks as they step out into the brisk evening air, it’s one she’s hungry to make. 


	15. swoon - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: an expansion on the greenhouse scene in Ep. 6, if not interrupted by Flora

“You know I live above that pub, right? Told you that already. Got a little flat right above the boring little pub.”

She knows what she’s doing, is the thing Jamie can’t quite wrap her head around. She absolutely knows what she’s doing. Where on earth is the woman from five days ago, the one who looked at her with such bruised eyes and swollen lips and tried plaintively to pull at her jacket? Where did she _go_ , and who is this bold version in her place?

Dangerous, probably. Already, she’s lowering whatever meager defenses Jamie had managed to craft over the past week. Already, she’s blowing right past them as though never there at all, and Jamie doesn’t fully _understand_ this. She’s never had trouble blocking someone out before--at least, not someone like Dani, who makes her feel...makes her feel...

_Good_. Makes her feel like the brightest thing in the room, most days. Makes her feel like no one has ever wanted her there so badly before. 

The woman’s only kissed her once, and already it feels like she’s made a home for Jamie somewhere in her heart. Somewhere under all the bad she’s carrying, under all the flinching she’s done, all the death and loss and fear, there’s a place for Jamie. If she wants it.

She’s looking at Jamie now like she’s _proud_ of how she walked in here this morning. Like she’s proud of how closely she’s standing, how she’s biting her lips now to hold back a grin so enormous, Jamie can’t help but return it. Five days away, and she returns to someone who knows what she’s doing--and what she’s doing is flirting so hard, it’s a wonder the table doesn’t catch fire.

_Did that on purpose_ , she thinks wonderingly. _What the fuck is happening._

***

The coffee, in its own way, worked. Not that she thought Jamie would actually _like_ it, because honestly, it’s bad coffee--and Jamie is just too British for words--but the thing is, it was never _meant_ to be liked. It was only meant to make Jamie smile.

Which it did. Eventually.

Or, she did. Is doing. Right now, as the words tumble out of her-- _Would you wanna get a drink? Away from the house. Away from all this. That could be kinda boring, right?_ \--a part of her is desperately terrified to realize, she is _doing_ this. She is leaning against this table, clutching a mug of truly toxic coffee, watching Jamie suck in her cheeks like it’s doing a damn thing to erase that smile. She is saying the words she’s been playing over and over in her head for five days running:

“You. And me. Could get a boring old drink. In a boring old pub.” God, her heart is sprinting. It’s entirely possible she won’t get out of this _sentence_ , with all its halting hesitation, alive, much less this greenhouse. “And see where that takes us.”

And this is the part where Jamie will melt, she hopes. _Swoon_ , even. The part the coffee laid road leading to, a glorious red herring approach. _Here_ , where Jamie will see that she means what she says, and she’ll grow faint with whatever affection Dani has earned, and this will all be--

She’s grinning. Jamie, not quite facing her, is grinning. 

“You know I live above that pub, right?” This is not, Dani recognizes, exactly what one might call a _swoon._ This is the expression of a woman who has done extremely quick math and come up with a calculation Dani had sort of hoped she’d swing right past. When she’d swoon. 

She is not swooning. She is, instead, leaning slightly back, eyebrows raised appraisingly, reminding Dani in one fell swoop that there are people who are eager to flirt and people who are _good_ at the art. And that Jamie, for all her glower and loner tendencies, is very, very good at the art. 

“Told you that already, didn’t I?” Her voice is almost soft, definitely teasing, her expression perfectly arranged to say _this is my territory, Poppins, and you had best be careful how you tread in my garden. “_ Got a little flat. Right above the boring little pub.”

And then she’s...turning back to the work. Turning away, not a blush to be found, not even the _hint_ of a swoon. Dani’s expression, so carefully schooled into neutrality, is breaking into the biggest grin of her _life_ and Jamie has the _temerity_ to not even keep eye contact.

“I mean--you maybe...mentioned it--”

“Only,” Jamie goes on, still focused on the task at hand--which Dani does not in the least understand, though there’s something to be said for Jamie in profile: head bent, eyes attentive, hands working into soil. Jamie never quite looks so alive as when she’s working, as though it is only in garden or greenhouse that she truly allows herself to flourish. 

_Would she look that alive_ , Dani wonders with unbidden curiosity, _anywhere else? Maybe in the boring little flat, maybe with me, maybe--_

“ _Only_ ,” Jamie repeats, darting a small glance her way. Dani realizes she’s staring, closes her mouth. “I figure there are plenty of places two people could go on a date. Which is, if I’m not mistaken, what you’re suggesting. Isn’t it?”

“It...I--yes.” No point denying it. No point trying to wash away the simple brazen fact. A boring little date. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t have to be a big--

“So,” Jamie says, her voice still doing that dangerous thing Dani doesn’t quite understand and can’t quite turn her attention from. That dangerous half-soft, half-amused thing that is all accent, all in control, all turning Dani’s own courage back on her like a firehose. “We could do it anywhere, couldn’t we? Doesn’t have to be the pub.”

“I--” Dani resists the urge to close her eyes. _She’s going to make me say it. She really is._ This wasn’t the plan, exactly. The plan had been so much simpler. It had not taken into account Jamie, who is going down into this thing with her willingly--but maybe not _easily_. “I mean, I just--”

“Just curious,” Jamie goes on breezily, drawing her hands from the soil at last and taking a slow step closer. The space between, already limited at best, reduces to nearly nothing in that single motion. Dani swallows.

“About?”

“It’s particular,” Jamie points out. A slight shift of hips, a nearly negligible twist of the waist, and she’s got Dani backed into a corner. Or, more accurately, against a table. “The pub. Bit curious, is all, why you’d want to get me into that pub.”

***

This poor woman is going to burst into flames, Jamie thinks, and maybe they’ll both deserve it. She isn’t upset with Dani anymore--has found in the span of about five minutes that there’s no staying upset with Dani when she turns those huge blue eyes on full-force, stands just so, puts on the bravest face Jamie has seen her wear since stalking Peter Quint through the night. She isn’t upset, exactly.

But Dani seems to think this was going to be _easy._ A cup of coffee. A slick line. She seems to think Jamie was just going to lean into it. 

Which she is. In her own way.

She’s careful not to touch Dani, not to press in with her body to such a degree that Dani will feel trapped. She’s only standing, a tiny width of space between them, her hands loose at her sides. Only standing, polite, smiling, waiting for an answer.

“Bit curious, is all, why you’d want to get me into that pub.”

“I don’t--I think--I mean--” Dani shakes her head slowly, her eyes wide and imploring. “Do you not...want to get a drink...”

“Didn’t say that.” The last five days haven’t been enjoyable. Burning sick days, pretending to be too ill to check in on the house, had felt cowardly. The shame in her stomach, twisting like acid around the hot desire of the memory, had felt familiar in the worst way--like being seventeen again, not knowing where to put all of these too-fierce feelings. Anger would have been easier. Disappointment, shame, embarrassment--each too heavy to put down on its own--had made for the worst kind of cocktail.

This, though. Dani looking at her--not needing to tip her head back, not needing to peer down, simply looking straight ahead and making perfect eye contact--feels good. Feels better than good. Feels like she’d felt in the moments before the flinch, when Dani had grinned into her mouth and pushed hard against her like she’d been waiting for this moment for days. This, Dani drawing deep breaths, clutching her mug, feels liking picking up right where they’d left off. 

_Dangerous_ , she thinks again. Dangerous, to let Dani in this way. Dangerous, to admit how alive she feels, teasing her this way. 

Dangerous, every time Dani’s eyes flick to her lips and back again. 

“You’re really not going to say it,” she says, shaking her head in a parody of disappointment, reaching in gently to pluck the mug from her hands and set it aside. “Poppins. Really. First rule of flirting.”

“What’s that?” There’s a challenge in Dani’s smile, she thinks. A challenge so light and so free--and so intoxicating in its authenticity--she can’t help but laugh. She makes a show of leaning close, watching Dani’s eyes darken, watching Dani’s breath catch.

“Always be ready to commit.”

***

_She’s going to kiss me_ , Dani thinks. _Here. Now. Six in the morning, she’s going to do it._

But, of course, Jamie doesn’t. Jamie, who thought it had been _her_ Dani was trying to get away from the other night. Jamie, who took it so to heart she hadn’t even come back for nearly a week. 

It’s been so strange, going through the motions without Jamie around. Strange and hollow, and Dani knows--the way you know you can’t keep holding your breath much longer--life will never feel quite as vibrant without Jamie in it. 

_Didn’t take long at all_ , she thinks, remembering the shadow of a young man standing before a dying fire. _Didn’t take long at all, but I can’t not know that._

Jamie’s here now, a crooked little half-smile on her lips, her eyes bright, but there’s something she’s still holding back. Something she’s still not absolutely sure Dani won’t let fall, split upon collision with the ground. 

She isn’t going to kiss Dani. She’s just going to stand here, making her crazy, smiling exactly like that. 

“Always be ready to commit.”

And there are other things Dani could do, it’s true--laugh, push at her shoulder, make another horrific stab at imitating her accent. There is plenty Dani could do.

But just now, with Jamie standing this close, with the air crisp and this single room so different than it had felt days ago, she’s not sure she can be blamed for what she settles on.

Not sure anyone could blame her for sliding a hand around Jamie’s middle, pushing off the table, using the momentum to twist until it’s _Jamie_ backed against the table, _Jamie_ looking at her with genuine surprise on her face.

_That_ , Dani thinks with terrified glee. _That’s the look I was going for._

"Consider me committed,” she says, and though Jamie had been careful not to touch her, she finds herself unable to do the same. Her hips press Jamie backward, one hand clenching at the small of Jamie’s back. The other finds Jamie’s sleeve, less for contact, more a desperate bid for balance.

“Touché,” Jamie says in a low voice--not that easy flirtation tone this time, but something less in control. “My, ah. Hands are dirty.”

“Do you want me to come back later?” 

Jamie laughs, leans forward, shakes her head. “Didn’t say that.”

It wasn’t the plan, to kiss her here. She’d meant only to apologize--or, not apologize, but make clear that she _was_ sorry how it had gone, that there are paths she very badly wants this to take that are the right way, the best way, the way it should have been all along. She’d meant only to make that clear, to land her proposal, to make Jamie feel a fraction as giddy as Jamie makes her every damn day.

And yet, with Jamie kissing back, Jamie making a helpless sound of frustration as her hands tip backward to grip the table behind her instead of ruining Dani’s coat, it feels _right_. It feels like meaning what she’s said. It feels like commitment. 

“For the record,” she adds, pulling away to breathe. Jamie’s knuckles are stark around the table, her elbows bent, her chest heaving. “This is why I’d like to get you into that pub. Or your _boring_ little flat. More of this.”

“Could’ve just said so,” Jamie says, and maybe it’s not swooning, exactly--but the flush in her face is deeply satisfying all the same, particularly when she tips her head back to allow Dani access to her neck. 

“I thought I’d be _polite_ about my desire to get you into bed, thank you.”

“Polite,” Jamie repeats, her voice sharpening when Dani slips a hand into her hair and kisses just above the collar of her jumpsuit. “Right. Completely slipped my mind.”

“I am,” Dani insists, pushing her harder against the table, “very polite.”

She is _alive_ , here in this greenhouse, choosing Jamie. She is alive, and she is free, and she is all but breathless when Jamie--patience giving at last like the final strand of a snapping rope--slips both hands into her coat and clenches her hips. Jamie, who is so alive with her hands at work, and so much _more_ so now, kissing until Dani is sure they’re both going to give up the idea of a date altogether and just settle for that rumpled little couch.

“Okay,” Jamie says at last, tipping her head away. Her hands are under Dani’s sweater, tracing the warm skin of her back, and Dani finds she couldn't care less about the dirt. “Okay. You’ve made your point, Poppins.”

“I have?”

“Mm.” Jamie leans her head down against Dani’s shoulder, exhales almost shakily. “No scary-bug flinch. Very good. Best save the rest for the boring little pub, yeah?”

Dani doesn’t want her to go. Doesn’t want her to pull free, put those hands back to work with plant and seed and root. Jamie is grinning again, brighter than anything Dani has seen in days, and Dani wants to stay within sight of that smile for the rest of her life. 

“You’ve got kids to wake. And I’ve got...um...things.”

“Things,” Dani repeats. Jamie nods. 

“Important things. With...plants...the work.” She reaches vaguely for a trowel, gestures with it like she’s considering bringing it to war. “Look, it’s early, I was not prepared for any of this, Poppins.”

Dani laughs, extricating herself at last and recovering her mug. Leaving is the last thing she’d like just now, but Jamie isn’t wrong--the kids will be up soon, and the day will fall into its usual register. Except, this time, she’ll know Jamie is out here, thinking about boring pubs and boring dates and the least boring kiss of Dani’s life. 

“Would,” she says, pausing at the door to glance back, “you call what you’re feeling now a _swoon_ , by chance?”

Jamie blinks. “I--um.”

“Never mind.” The answer, Dani decides, is almost certainly _yes._

***

_Honestly,_ thinks Jamie, watching her stroll--stroll! as if Dani Clayton _strolls_ anywhere!--out the door, _she did every last bit of that on purpose._

“Swoon,” she mumbles, shaking her head. “Don’t fuckin’ swoon.”

It would, she thinks as she tries in vain to remember where she’d left off, explain the vague sense she might at any moment pass out--but Dani doesn’t need to know that.

If she gets any more brazen, after all, Jamie is going to be in serious fucking trouble.


	16. reckless - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Damie argue over who is more reckless--as ghosts

She’d thought, when she was much younger, she’d have more in her head today. Big worldly concerns, or tiny personal ones--thoughts of the expansive universe to which she will still belong, even if she isn’t strictly speaking _her_ anymore, and thoughts of the little flat she’s been renting for the past few years. What will happen to her few belongings, to the box in which she keeps all the parts of Dani she couldn’t--even decades later--bring herself to part with? What will happen to the plants, to the stray cat who visits on its own timeline, to the photos and journals that chronicle a life lived too alone to stomach?

Thoughts, big and small, important and petty. She’d assumed she’d have them all, in this moment. 

But, in fact, there is really only the one. One simple thought, maybe foolish in nature, but no less loving: _I’m here. I got here._

It hadn’t been a certainty. There is no such thing, she supposes, as certainty when it comes to the end of one’s life--particularly when one has been smoking entirely too much for entirely too long. Cigarettes do a person no health favors, she thinks wryly; _who knew?_ She hadn’t cared, at sixteen, at twenty-three, at thirty. Had cared even less, if it was possible, by the time she was sharing those cigarettes with Dani Clayton. And after?

After, it had been almost a challenge. _Take me, then. Take me like she wouldn’t._ She’s not proud of it, how often she’d sat back and chain-smoked in the living room, the rug strewn with flats and dirt and seedlings. _I’ll make them live, and these will kill me slowly, and all will be on balance._

The raving thoughts of a grieving woman. She’d had plenty of those, in the beginning. Plenty of insane ideas, the fabrications of denial and anger, bargaining and depression. She’d lost her mind for a while, she suspects, and even getting it back hadn’t felt entirely like coming home to herself. Not when there was no Dani present to laugh with, to kiss, to fall asleep curled around. 

It wasn’t _herself_ she came back to, precisely--not Jamie Taylor, who had made such grand mistakes, had learned such desperate lessons, had fallen so in love against her best judgment. Not Jamie Taylor, who’d made a home for herself at Bly--and, more solidly, more importantly, in Dani. That woman, she thinks, is gone--drowned as surely as Dani. That woman never quite emerged again. 

This one--the one who has been carrying Dani’s story in her heart ever since--is different. Jamie Clayton does not possess the same gruff exterior; she thinks any hope of that was shorn away the night she unfurled her life’s comedy of errors to Dani like a one-woman play. Or maybe the night she’d held Dani, shivering all over, after the Lady had come to call. Or maybe the morning she’d extended a promise. 

This woman is not gruff, is not properly shielded from the world in layers of grit and good humor. This woman is quiet. Her smiles do not, perhaps, reach her eyes. She loves, but her love is not the fierce devotion of a wife who is simply incapable of giving in--not for anyone but the memory of Dani, who seems even now to be just out of reach. Dani got all of her--every bit--Jamie Taylor and Jamie Clayton alike--and everyone who has come after, every friend and acquaintance and stranger, has only the Storyteller. Whatever that may mean.

It was the Storyteller who came back out of that lake, sputtering and sobbing. It was the Storyteller who moved slowly back to the cab, to the airport, to Vermont. The Storyteller, who packed up the shop and the apartment. The Storyteller, who made a point to never again stop moving for long. Wasn’t any point. The stopping had already happened. The shelter had already been built. Time, then, to move on. 

And keep moving. 

Until now.

She’d always planned, in that deep-recess area of her mind where instinct lives, to make it back here someday. Just once. Just for this. Dani wouldn’t take her then, it’s true, but she’d been different all those years ago. Younger. The kind of foolish that comes with youth. She’d _felt_ ancient, swimming out, and even older swimming back, but she’d been barely forty-five. A life only half-lived, though she’d thought it over the second she’d looked down and found Dani staring back. 

Dani wouldn’t take her then, no matter how hard she’d begged, and she’d been _furious_ \--for a while. Furious, and broken, and unable to breathe under the weight of all the nights she’d woken reaching for a body no longer within her grasp.

She hadn’t understood. Still doesn’t, maybe, even now. Dani didn’t have to take her. Dani could simply have shown herself--just once--and it would have been--

_Enough?_ she thinks, and closes her eyes against fresh pain. No. Never enough. One look, and maybe she’d have lost her mind for good and all. One look, and maybe she really would have drowned, though she’d have been glad to do it. 

It wouldn’t have been enough. Nothing but Dani back, Dani _here,_ could ever be enough.

And so:

She’s standing at the edge of the lake. Her back is bowed, her hair pure silver--nothing new, it had lost the last of its color barely five years after Dani had gone. She thinks sometimes it was a mark of trauma. Thinks other times that there are some faces you simply can’t bear to see in the mirror, not if the eyes of the woman you most loved will never look upon it again. Sometimes, the body understands what the mind can’t fathom. 

Poetic, maybe.

Bullshit, maybe.

Either way, she is silvered, and she is bent, and she is so tired. So tired, and so _ready_. It feels different than it had at forty-something, different than it had even at sixty. That had been the feverish agony of a woman not ready to live without Dani Clayton. This?

This is merely the end of the road. 

“All right,” she says, and her voice isn’t what Dani would remember--softer, the accent muddled from years in America, and then England, France, England again. There’s a little more London in her now, and a little Paris, and lot of Dani Clayton’s particular brand of Midwest. She is, as any good Storyteller becomes, something of an amalgamation. A sum of all the parts she’s taken on over the years. 

Still. It is hers, beneath it all. Her voice, ringing across the water as the sun sinks low. 

“All right, Poppins,” she says. “Time now, I think. D’you want company after all?”

_I’m here_ , she thinks, sinking to sit beside the waves. Water drifts up, brushes the tops of her shoes. She allows it without flinching, closing her eyes. _I’m here, Dani. Always said I would be, and I am._

Not a big thought. Nothing important or world-shaking. Just--

A blink. Like falling asleep. It takes no more, no less, and she almost doesn’t realize it’s happened. Almost doesn’t recognize the change for what it is until she is looking down at her own hands--strong hands, steady, unshaking hands--and tracing the smooth skin with the tip of one finger.

“Right,” she says aloud. “It’s done.”

She pushes to her feet, and there’s no shock in her dress--no shock that she’d be in this hated brown shirt, these jeans, these canvas high-tops. No shock that her hair would be pulled back from her face--not silver, not completely, but threaded in bright sparks through the brown like so much starlight. Of course this would be it. This is how she went, really--not seventy-eight and bent in on herself, but just shy of forty-five. Just shy of a full fifteen years with Dani Clayton.

A person can die, she thinks idly, in so many different ways before it’s all over. No one talks about that. No one seems to--

A footstep, behind her. An animal, maybe, come to inspect the remains of the Storyteller. She turns her head, and even as she’s turning, her heart--how she can feel her heart when it has so clearly stopped, she doesn’t know, doesn’t _care_ , it’s no less real for its impossibility--is rocketing out of rhythm. Her lungs, clearer than they’ve been in decades, swell with a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes, sharp and keen, settle on the woman.

“Dani.”

For a moment, they simply stare at one another--Jamie, frozen in brown flannel, black canvas, silver-threaded hair; Dani, locked permanently into that jumper, with the sleeves that fell over her hands when Jamie took them in her own, the one Jamie had to help her out of at the end of the night because she’d been shaking too badly to do it herself. For a moment, they stand, and they stare, and then Jamie is moving. Faster than she remembers being able to move. Here one moment, there the next, her arms around Dani in a wild embrace.

“Fucking thought you’d be--you’d have forgotten--”

Dani buries her face against her shoulder, warm and sweet and somehow smelling just as she had their whole life together. The same smell that took an achingly long time to fade from the flat. Jamie hadn’t been able to make herself go until it was gone, until every last breath of Dani was lost, until--

“Jamie,” Dani says, and even the voice is the same. Her face, her eyes, her hands--all as Jamie remembers. Not that last time, not in the lake, but for all the years leading up. Dani, as perfect and wonderful as in her dreams. 

“Jamie,” Dani repeats, and she’s shaking almost too hard to register, for a moment, the slight uptick of the second syllable. The very mild upward curve that Jamie hasn’t heard in such a long time. No one else says her name like that. No one else.

It takes a surprisingly long amount of time, then, for her to realize:

That is how Dani says her name when she is _in_ _trouble._

_***_

It hurts, watching Jamie. For a long time, it hurts, a deep-pull ache like gravity, like a bone that never quite sets properly. Dani hadn’t realized things could still hurt, in death--hadn’t quite realized how it feels to have time wash over, not one beat at a time, but in a single hurried dash.

For her, she is alive, and she is dead, and she has been both longer than anyone cares to remember.

For Jamie, she’s been gone seven days--

Seven weeks--

Seven years--

For Jamie, she’s been gone, and gone, and gone, and the ache persists...but something else, slowly, begins to work its way in, too. Something Dani had not altogether expected. 

_Aggravation._

_Worry._

_Desperation._

Jamie, her beautiful, rational, pragmatic Jamie. Her solid, strong, patient Jamie. Jamie who has always believed in her. Jamie who has always made sense. 

Jamie, who is--

***

“Leaving _doors_ open, Jamie?” Dani has repeated this same about six times. Her voice is nearly shrill, her hands waving; if Jamie didn’t know any better, she’d think they were both very much alive, still back in the old apartment, Dani wondering _why, Jamie, you thought putting the bed frame together meant_ drape a sheet over the mattress corner, _Jamie._ If Jamie didn’t know any better, she’d swear they never left. 

_Quick,_ she thinks in a less-than-stellar moment of brilliance, _pin her to a wall, kiss her neck._

“You weren’t there,” she says weakly. “You--I wanted to make sure--”

“Jamie!” Dani is pressing probing fingers against her forehead, as though pushing back against a migraine. “I mean, in the apartment was bad enough--you knew how that kid downstairs was about _borrowing_ things, but. Hotels? _Hostels_? Jamie, for the love of god, you even refused to lock the _car_.”

“Didn’t sleep in the car,” Jamie says, a bit defensively. Dani raises her eyebrows. “Often. Okay, look, I know it _sounds_ bad, but--”

“Oh, didn’t just sound bad, Jamie.” Dani is stomping back and forth along the shore, her hands lost beneath the drape of her jumper sleeves. It’s an image that inspires such a strong wave of memory that Jamie almost tips over backwards. 

_We’re in the hall_ , she thinks suddenly. _We never left. She’s asking me to stay, and I’m taking her hands, and she’s kissing me--_

“You’re not even listening,” Dani says sharply, and she realizes they really _are_ in the hall now--both of them, now and then, a matched set. Dani, in this exact outfit twice over. Jamie, in that old t-shirt and jeans, her hands guiding Dani’s to her body. 

“How--are we--”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain,” Dani says, sounding slightly less vexed. “That’s how it goes, when you’re--when you--it’s all confetti, Jamie. All of it. Do you know how many _times_ I saw it all go bad?”

“But.” That doesn’t make sense. She’s fine. Well--not fine, precisely; in the strictest sense, she is rather dead, rather permanently so--but it happened on _her_ terms. Her decision. Back to Bly, back home again, once more into the lake--or at least the shore of same, and--

“Jamie.” Dani’s hand is slipping into her own, squeezing gently. “Look.”

She is forty-four, and aching, the door propped open with a snow boot. She is forty-four, asleep on the couch, unable to bring herself to the bedroom. She is forty-four, and someone is--someone is--

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she mumbles, even as she watches a lanky frame--that very kid Dani had mentioned, slipping into the apartment. Pausing to stare down at Jamie’s sleeping body. Shaking his head and heading toward the stereo--

She blinks, and the very same boy is standing up straight, spinning on his heel, walking right back into the hall. The door clicks softly shut behind him.

“That--I mean--it doesn’t prove--”

Another blink of time. She is in her fifties now, silver-haired, dozing in a hotel chair. Flora’s wedding, maybe--or similar, she’s lost track of hotel rooms exactly like this one, every one painted in white and blue and floral prints on the wall. 

She’s in her fifties, and the door is propped open as always, and there is a man who reeks of alcohol, bumbling in. Staggering against the wastebasket in the corner. Tripping over himself as he makes toward the bed--pauses--stares down at Jamie--

She blinks, and the man is straightening, shoulders back, marching right back out the way he’d come in a neat, graceful arc. The door, again, latches in his wake.

“Hang on,” she says, starting to get it, “hang on, you’re not honestly telling me--”

She is in her early seventies, draped over her flat’s pitiful sofa, and the door is open, two men in black are slipping into the room, one gazing down at her with an expression of distaste on his face--

“This one had a _gun_ , Jamie,” Dani says, sounding utterly aggrieved. “Do you know how hard it is to possess _two_ grown men into not murdering your sleeping wife? I can only do one at a _time_ , Jamie.”

“How...many times...”

“ _Too many, Jamie, Jesus.”_ Dani heaves a sigh. “I literally left so you wouldn’t be killed, do you have _any_ idea how _maddening_ you made things?”

“You could have stopped it,” Jamie says. Dani gestures emphatically toward the scene, which is slowly dissipating back into the manor hall. 

“I did stop it! So many times! Not to mention all the times you dozed off on the road, or drank a bottle of wine and then went up to hang out on the roof, I mean. Jamie. I love you very much, but _what_ the _fuck_?”

“You could have stopped it,” Jamie repeats, her voice low and even. Her heart is still clamoring, her hands itching to grab hold of Dani again--and she will. She knows it, even now, even with Dani _furious_ at her, that this is just a beat. Just a conversation they have to have, before it all goes back to the way it should have never stopped being. “If you’d just let me see you _once_. One time, Dani.”

“I--” Dani inhales, as if steadying herself. “I couldn’t.”

“Oh, but you could _possess_ people? You could catch me whenever I started to veer off the road or tilt over the edge?” She’s surprised to find there’s a little anger left in her, a little surprising dose of the old Jamie rage buried beneath years and years of therapy. “Dani, if you’d just let me--”

“If I’d let you,” Dani says quietly, “would you ever have done anything else?”

Jamie hesitates. So easy, she thinks, to say yes. Yes, of course, I wasn’t _suicidal_ , just miserable, just lonely, just _grieving, Dani._

But, in the end, was there so much of a difference? A life lived well in daylight and recklessly under the stars is still dangerous. A life never letting anyone else in, because it might mean explaining the ritual she couldn’t put away, even at the end. Bathtubs filled to spilling. Doors unlatched. Eyes searching every reflection. 

“I wanted you to be happy,” Dani says. “I wanted you to _live._ Wasn’t stupid enough to think you’d stop being stubborn, but I thought you’d at least close the goddamn door, Jamie.”

“Couldn’t.” Her throat is dry, tight, her hands shaking. “Couldn’t if it meant letting you go. You know that. You had to know that.”

Dani seems to deflate, shoulders hunching in, head bowing. “Yeah. I did.”

“Anyway,” Jamie says, “look who’s talking, _stubborn_. You put yourself on a _plane_ without me, Dani. You wouldn’t even _talk_ to me--”

“I did talk to you.” There is no anger in her voice now, no desperation. She sounds very calm. “I talked to you, and I let you hold me, and I let us both believe it was never going to happen. For as long as I could. But she tried to take you, too, Jamie. She tried one time, and I wasn’t willing to sit around until it took.”

“Dani Clayton,” Jamie says, almost grinning. “Bit of a weirdo--”

“--so much stronger than I knew,” Dani finishes. Her hands are taking Jamie’s again, pulling her close. “I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted--I planned--I mean, not exactly a _party_ , but...you had me scared. I didn’t even know that could happen, after it all ends. but it turns out...”

“You really possessed all those people?” Jamie looks at her with fresh wonder. Dani winces.

“Okay, don’t put it that way, I only did it long enough to get them away from you.”

“And me?” It’s never occurred to her before, this grim fascination of an idea. “Did you ever do it to--”

“No!” Dani looks horrified. “No. I just...think of it like a hand on your shoulder.” 

“How often?” 

Dani is smiling. A sad smile, but there’s hope in her eyes. The whole picture is so like the summer they’d met, so like how Dani had looked at her before she’d taken that first big leap of faith and reached for Jamie in a greenhouse. 

“Always. All the time. I mean--time, now, is kind of _always_ anyway, but...yeah. Always.”

“So you...saw me...” Jamie winces. “With the water. And the mirrors. And the--”

“Oh, don’t think we’re done talking about this,” Dani says, almost genial in her aggravation. “Jamie, you were _seventy-eight years old_ and sleeping on the _fucking floor.”_

“Hey,” says Jamie quickly, “been a long time. You should, uh, show me how this whole ghost thing works. Can we fly? I bet we can fly.”

Dani opens her mouth as if to say _don't change the subject, we have almost thirty-five years of recklessness to discuss_ \--then seems to change her mind. She’s kissing Jamie, and it’s as real as anything, as solid and perfect and like coming home as it ever was. She’s dreamed about this. For decades, she’s dreamed about Dani’s arms around her like this, Dani kissing her with that familiar old hunger. 

Dani, whose eyes are as blue as the woman who once stared with blank surprise at Jamie in a kitchen, leans back. “Seriously, though, Jamie, no beds? Ever? How were you even able to _walk_ at the end there?”

“Had to get back to you somehow,” Jamie says, and then, thoughtfully: “There are beds here, though, huh? Good ones. I seem to remember...”

“Not done talking about it,” Dani reminds her, easing in for another long kiss. The hall is shifting around them, changing, Dani’s old bedroom rising up in its wake. “But Jamie?”

“Mm?” It’s just like she remembered--no double-dose of them this time, either. Just Dani, leaning almost shyly against the edge of the mattress, reaching up to hold her when she moves in close. Just Dani, nuzzling gently into her, hands cradling her face.

“Welcome home.”


	17. the longest story - dani/jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: vampire AU

It’s the quiet she likes best, she thinks. The quiet, the dark, the simplicity. No one asks anything of her anymore. No one makes demands. She belongs to no one at all these days, for the first time since she can remember.

Except the Lady. She’ll always belong to her. 

But there’s a give to these things as well as a take, and Dani Clayton sometimes thinks it’s worth it. Worth it, not to have to sit at dinner parties and elegant balls. Worth it, not to have to titter and engage in small talk. Worth it, not to have to wear the ring.

Worth it, to leave him behind. 

And if it’s all shadow, all lonely, all deep-rooted ache she can never seem to soothe, that’s fine enough. She belongs to no one. No one except the Lady, and the Lady asks so little of her. Only to carry the curse--the disease--the hunger. Only to feed the shade coiled around the remnants of her old self. Only to wake. To walk. To drink. 

It’s dramatic, she thinks, but a little theater never hurt anyone. She makes sure of that much. It’s sustainable, so long as she keeps walking, walking, walking in the quiet. The dark. The simplicity.

It’s sustainable, until she reaches the village.

***

The pub is nearly empty. Too late, or too cold, or too poor an economic situation for carousing to be the game--Dani doesn’t much care which is the real reason. She likes the emptiness of the tables, chairs pushed patiently into place, every surface as clean as it is old. She likes the warm lighting, the oak bar, the smooth wooden floorboards under her boots. 

The mirror, she does not care for, turning her head swiftly away so as not to see the void where a young woman ought to stand. This part, she has never grown used to. This part, even after carrying the Lady--the Lady’s _curse_ , more like, to hunger and need and wallow in lonely anger--for decades. She barely remembers, now, what that woman looks like. Blonde hair. Pale skin. Paler now than it had been in life, but only by so much--her mother had held such strong opinions as to what women should do with their time, and _lounging in the sun_ had never been part of the pageant. _Polite society, Danielle, has no use for a lady like_ that. 

_Like what?_ she’d always wondered, never quite daring to ask. _Adventurous? Athletic? Interesting?_

No matter. The past is long, long dead--deader even than she could imagine back then, dreaming of being someone else. Someone free. All of them are gone now: her mother, with her antiquated ideas; her mother’s friends, who peered down their noses at Dani and smiled without heart; even Edmund. Even him. 

Long dead, now. Old age, or unrepentant illness, or freak accident--she doesn’t know. She wasn't there. 

The woman she was is dead, too, Danielle Clayton buried in a grave she’d only hauled herself back out of the next night. The Lady had whispered in her ear, granted unexpected strength, unexpected fury. Danielle went in. Dani came back out again. No one ever needs to remember. 

And no one ever has. She’s been walking for--fifty years, now? More, maybe. The date on the newspaper crumpled on one table reads June 24, 1987. More than fifty years gone in a blink, and Dani is still here. Washed clean, maybe, of all the bits that had once made up a patient, kind, hopeful young teacher. But here all the same. 

She settles at the table, drawing a book from her bag. The night is still young, the hunger not yet pricking at her patience. It’s good to start smooth, start simple, to remind the Lady that the curse might have its needs, but it is _Dani_ who is still in control. Dani, who, despite making a decision unwary of its consequences so long ago, has managed to hang on this long.

Still here. Still walking. Still--

“Get you something?”

Her head snaps up, her body primed to run. An old instinct. As if anyone could touch her without consent now.

The woman watching her looks curious, but only faintly so, as if by old habit. Her hair is tied off her face with a bandana, her sleeves cuffed at the elbows. There is a loveliness about her Dani has always fostered a weakness for--a loveliness that matches, in a less primal way, that of the Lady who had come to her in that dream so long ago. _Walk with me. Walk with me, and you’ll never be alone again._

She shakes her head, smiles. “I’m fine, thank you.”

“Right,” says the woman slowly. “Only, this isn’t a library. Don’t order something, Tom’ll have me throw you out.”

She speaks like she doesn’t much care one way or another, but Dani has been around long enough to read between the lines of a person. The words are callous, but the inflection is specific--the emphasis placed not on _throw you out_ as a threat, but _Tom’ll have me._ An apology before an offense. The woman glances toward the window, aware of the wind battering the glass, her expression calmly letting Dani know _I’d rather not have to._

“I’ll have whatever’s your favorite,” Dani says. Eyebrows raise, the woman’s head tilting. 

“Mine?”

“Sure.” Dani smiles, reaches across, touches the woman’s hand lightly where it rests on the table. It’s easier, influencing human minds through touch. She doesn’t like doing it at all, if she can help it--there’s a film over the idea, a nasty oily sense of _wrong_ \--but sometimes it can’t be helped. People who look at her the way this woman is looking tend to become a problem.

People who smile at her the way this woman is beginning to smile, lips quirking up at the corners like she doesn’t quite mean to, tend to become a danger to themselves and others. 

Mostly themselves.

The woman disappears briefly behind the bar; Dani, aware of the mirror, doesn’t watch her go. Her eyes remain on her book, her fingers tracing mindless sigils into the table until a glass is set gently down before her. A thin amber ale of some kind--Dani feels no curiosity, no interest at all. She smiles. 

“Thank you.”

“Sure,” the woman says. Hesitates, as though wanting to say more. Shakes her head. The fog--the sense of _forget_ Dani brings in her wake--is already sinking its claws into this woman, already wiping Dani away. Good. It’s best when they don’t see her, don’t take an interest, don’t remember when she’s gone.

Especially women who smile like this one. 

She leaves the drink untouched, putting away two chapters in easy silence. Money, she drops on the table. No one looks up as she strides back out into the dark. 

Tonight’s meal will be found elsewhere.

***

The story should end here, she knows--a person like Dani is only still here because she’s long-since learned the art of _keep moving_. The Lady commands it. The Lady is impatient to walk. 

The hunger, pushing in along her ribs, pulsing under her wrists, is impatient for more. 

She ought to leave the little village be. There’s not much here to begin with, and it’s dangerous to feed in places where one single thread can be followed to each house in turn. Dani’s careful not to hurt where she doesn’t have to, not to kill _ever_ \--a little time, a little tender care, is all it takes to prevent it. She hasn’t left a body behind in almost thirty years. There’s really no excuse for making a kill where one could simply leave a vacant few minutes of memory, she thinks. 

Not that humans recognize the kindness for what it is. Not that she can blame them for their fear. She was afraid once, too--waiting, always, for the Lady to become Beast, for her to rise up over Dani’s good sense and turn her into something hateful. Dying, for Dani, hadn’t been the hard part. The idea of becoming something she isn’t...

But it’s been years and years, and she is still here. Still Dani. Lonely, and quiet, and living the simplest life she can manage, given the circumstances.

And back at this same pub again.

_Shouldn’t_ , she thinks--knows, though she’s pushing the door open and striding back to that same table again. Out comes the book. Her eyes remain resolutely clear of the bar, of the mirror, of any patrons who might give her trouble. 

“Back again?”

The woman, this time in a t-shirt, her curls loose around her face. Same woman. Same smile. Same problem. 

Dani really knows better. 

“Noticed you didn’t touch the ale,” the woman points out, leaning her hip against the table. There’s a quiet confidence to the way she holds herself, a constrained line of motion that says she’s in no hurry. Dani watches her, smiling a little, and thinks, _Shouldn’t be here._

“No, I,” she begins to reply. Her smile fades to a frown. “Wait. Noticed.”

“Yeah,” the woman says. “And you overpaid. Drinks much pricier in America, then?”

Dani wouldn’t know. Dani hasn’t set foot in America since the sixties. 

“I guess,” she says, still puzzled. This woman shouldn’t be speaking of last night as though it was--well. Only last night. This woman shouldn’t _remember_ Dani at all. The Lady’s influence generally makes certain of that. 

All these years, it’s never failed her. 

That is the idea.

“Something darker tonight, maybe?” the woman goes on, watching Dani with shrewd eyes. “A stout?”

“Okay,” Dani agrees, knowing full well she won’t touch it when the drink comes, and finding herself quite unable to say no. Quite unable to do what she should, which is to slip out before the woman can return to this table and smile at her again.

_Try harder_ , she tells herself, when the glass is standing proudly beside her book, laid face-down on the table. _Try harder to do it._ Because, the thing is, if this woman remembers her--if this woman _keeps_ remembering her--she’s bound to find herself on the other side of a beheading. A torch. A particularly sharp slat of wood. 

Her hand brushes the woman’s again, her fingers tingling. The skin is soft, the nails short; when she turns the woman’s hand over in her own, she finds callouses on the pads of her fingers. 

“Bold,” the woman says, amused--but there’s a flare of something more in her eyes, matching her smile too well. Dani swallows. Presses forward with her own mind, gently caressing the woman’s intentions. _Forget me_ , she wills. _I was never here._

“Enjoy,” the woman says, the clear focus in her eyes drifting to hazy confusion. 

Dani watches her go, her chest tight with an unfamiliar sensation--something _like_ hunger, and yet...

No one, she thinks, has ever remembered her when she’d wanted them to forget. No one since the Lady’s curse. Even Edmund, who had dreamed of a big wedding, a big house, a big family since they were children, had forgotten her, in the end. Easily. She’d willed it, and walked away, and he had forgotten she’d ever climbed out of that grave. 

This woman, whose name is not Dani’s to know, whose life is not Dani’s to touch, remembered. 

Even as she’s leaving, even as she’s slipping out into the dark to find someone to dull the Lady’s hunger, Dani knows she’ll be back again. A terrible idea. A terrible test of the universe’s machinations. And yet.

She can’t erase the curiosity, bent behind a shop with a young woman’s wrist pulsing warm against her lips. She can’t erase the way the woman had smiled at her with knowing amusement, as her teeth sharpen and the Lady takes what she needs. She can’t _forget_ , as copper runs sweet across her tongue, and the girl sitting on the pavement heaves a languid sigh beneath her. 

It’s an awful idea. Truly, the worst. 

She has to know.

***

“Starting to think you don’t actually drink.”

The woman actually sits this time, sprawling into the chair across from Dani as though belonging there all along. Dani bites down on a smile.

“Why else would I come to a place like this?”

“The company?” the woman suggests, and though her tone is idle, her smile scorches. Dani shakes her head, laughing. 

She can’t remember the last time she laughed. 

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she confides. The woman raises her eyebrows. 

“Where are you supposed to be?”

_Alone_ , Dani thinks. _Forgotten_ , Dani thinks. _That was the deal_ , Dani thinks, the price of a young woman’s freedom. Wake. Walk. Feed. There has never needed to be anything else. 

“Not here,” she settles on saying--a truth without teeth. The woman nods slowly, leaning across the table, her hand sliding over pocked wood to brush Dani’s wrist. 

“Doesn’t seem to be stopping you. Twice is an accident. Three is a habit.”

She isn’t wrong. Two people in this village bear Dani’s mark now, the inner slope of their wrists stained with new scars they won’t be able to explain. She’ll have to drink from a third tonight, and the odds of getting out unscathed--even with the fog clearing her from their minds the minute she walks away--shrink yet again. This isn’t a good idea. 

But this woman, impossibly, illogically, remembers her. Forgot, maybe, briefly--in the time it took Dani to pay and leave--and then the memory just...sprang back into place. Dani has made mistakes with women before, has let their smiles grace her heart in ways she was never meant to allow, but it’s never resulted in _this._

“I’m Jamie,” the woman says, and Dani almost recoils--almost says, _Don’t tell me that, don’t put that on me, you’re not supposed to remember--but I won’t be able to forget._

“Dani,” she says instead, and feels the Lady pulse deep in the place she’s always imagined her soul to rest. The Lady, a curse--a gift--a structure around which she’s built her second chance at life. The Lady, who looks upon Jamie now and sends a powerful swell of hunger up through Dani’s bones. 

_Take her. Take her. She wants it,_ look _at her._

Jamie does, Dani senses, want something. Something that has no need for Dani’s influence, no requirement for Dani pulling the strings. Jamie wants something from her--something honest, something human--and the very idea of it spikes fresh terror like she hasn’t felt in decades.

“This is a bad idea,” she says in a low voice. “It’s dangerous.”

Jamie, fingers tracing Dani’s palm, searching out her lifeline, shrugs. “Always is. Doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.”

***

There’s a place upstairs, a little flat. Jamie leads the way as though she’s done this a hundred times, taking Dani’s hand with an almost nonchalant gesture. 

“If you let me in,” Dani says, “this gets so much more complicated.”

“I’ll take the chance,” Jamie says. She should be laughing as she says it, a flirtatious bit of banter designed to delight, but she isn’t. She’s looking at Dani, her free hand turning the key, like she already understands. 

“I’m not,” Dani says. Stops. Sighs. “I’m not what you’re--what you think I--”

“Start here,” Jamie says, and pushes open the door. An invitation without words, one Dani can’t resist leaning into. She hasn’t let herself accept an invitation like this in so long. 

_Take her_ , the Lady breathes. _Take her, bring her to me._ Dani squeezes her hands into fists, the familiar rage of hunger grinding against this new, too-human variant. Jamie is closing the door, kicking off her shoes, smiling. 

The smile is what really breaks her. The smile, which is a little teasing, a little tempting, but mostly just _real._

She’s kissing Jamie before she can stop herself, and even as she’s doing it, there is something too warm about it. Something too _good_ about the way Jamie catches her, hands digging into Dani’s hair, lips parting when Dani brushes against her with the tip of her tongue. For all the skin she’s tasted, all the times she’s kissed and licked and bitten, this is different. This is--

This has no _path_. No road to follow to the end. No lie baked into the heart of it. Every woman she’s ever led into the dark, every time she’s ever drank deep and pulled back before the Lady can win back control, seems to fall away in comparison to how desperately she’s kissing Jamie. This person she barely knows. This woman who slips a hand around her hip like an anchor. This woman whose kiss is confident, who is _smiling_ into her, who leans back breathlessly and says, “You’re sure about this?”

“Don’t ask me that,” Dani breathes, kissing her again. Jamie makes a soft groaning sound, tilting her head away. 

“Why not?”

“Because,” Dani says, unable to stop herself from kissing around every word, “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Shouldn’t, or don’t want to be?” Jamie is backing her against the wall, and Dani can hear her heartbeat, can’t seem to erase the dizzy scent of life pouring off of her in waves. Blood, yes, thrumming beneath her skin, but also breath, and desire, and something giddy and nameless that can only be _joy._

Such a human thing, joy. Why, then, does Dani feel it pressing in on her, too?

“Hey.” Jamie has stopped kissing her, is simply holding her face gently between her hands. Her thumbs have found Dani’s cheekbones, are pressing so lightly, Dani closes her eyes to keep from crumbling. 

“Hey.”

“If you really don’t feel good about this, we don’t have to. We can, I dunno. Talk. Or not. Whatever you want.”

Dani breathes slowly, all the little measures of _human_ in a body that is _not_. She likes breathing, she’s found. Likes willing her heart to beat. Likes feeling warm, likes feeling as though any sunrise _might_ be welcome, someday. Someday, when all of this fades. 

Like it ever can. Like the Lady would ever allow it. That wasn’t the deal.

“There are things,” she says hollowly, “you don’t know.”

“All the things,” Jamie agrees comfortably. “Everything except your name and what you _don’t_ like to drink.”

Despite herself, Dani laughs again. She leans forward until her forehead presses Jamie’s, until Jamie’s breath coasting lightly across her lips is the only thing she can feel. 

The only thing outside of the beating, raging, desperate hunger.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” she says. “I--sometimes even I think I’m crazy.” And, really, might she be? Might this all be some delusion, some shattering of sense that has led her to believe there will be no woman waiting for her in the mirror? Or, worse, a delusion leading her to believe she _is_ here--that she _is_ still Dani, despite it all?

“Tell me anyway,” Jamie says, and Dani kisses her again. Kisses the edges of her lips, the curve of her jaw, the length of her neck. Kisses the place where the pulse beats like fists against a casket lid, her lips parting, her tongue flat against the salt of Jamie’s skin. She hears Jamie draw a sharp breath, one hand tight in her hair, hears Jamie say, “ _Yes_ ” in a tone Dani has to fight to deny.

She doesn’t mean it. She can’t mean it. She doesn’t _know_. 

And Dani, though the Lady roars with that unrelenting need, can’t take. Not like this. Not here. This woman _remembers_ her. This woman will _remember_ tomorrow, even if Dani slips out of her bed, even if Dani never shows her face again. She’ll remember. It will, somehow, unfairly, haunt the rest of her life. 

“It’s a long story,” she says, face still buried in Jamie’s neck. Her hips are twitching against Jamie’s thigh, her hands sliding under Jamie’s shirt. “A long, crazy story.”

“I have time,” Jamie says. Dani lifts her head. Smiles. 

It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s meant to be quiet. Dark. Simple.

Lonely. 

That was the deal.

“The teacher,” she says quietly, closing her eyes as she scrounges for the beginning for the first time in over fifty years, “was, by choice, a solitary young woman...”

Jamie listens.


	18. injustice - jamie and owen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: "She's gone, Owen. She's gone."

The greatest injustice in the world, Owen Sharma thinks, is in how many women he’s buried. How many loved ones-- _why are brilliant young women always punished?_ \--he’s laid to rest. How many times he’s looked away for only a second, only to find they’ve slipped through his fingers.

The greatest injustice in the world, Owen thinks, is in how many times he’s stood over the graves of women who should have had so much more _time._ Women with new recipes untested, new cities left unexplored, new experiences permanently unlived. Rebecca Jessel will never practice law. Hannah Grose will never see Paris. Dani Clayton will never...

Dani will never...

He’s never even _there_. Maybe that’s the worst part of all--that he’s always just off-camera, always just this side of where he ought to be. At home, when Rebecca drowned; at the manor when his mother passed; looking at his shoes while Hannah...

And now: now, with no warning at all, the phone ringing in the middle of the night. The voice on the other end is almost unrecognizably flat. The voice on the other end, he thinks, will haunt his dreams for years to come.

“Come to Vermont.”

“Jamie?” She sounds _wrong_. Not simply too calm, not simply too level, but as though all the life has been wrung from her body. As though she’s calling him from another plane altogether, and Owen will later be embarrassed by his first awful thought: _She’s dead. She’s calling me from her own grave. It’s Hannah all over again._

But of course nothing ever could be. Nothing could ever match Hannah, the impossibility of her that summer. The impossible, cruel way the universe had of pushing her nearly into his arms before letting that trapdoor fall open beneath his feet. Jamie isn’t dead; Jamie is breathing into the other end of the phone, as though straining to keep herself together. Which can only mean one thing. 

He’s on the first flight. A bag with a few changes of clothes, a passport, a photo he is to this day unable to travel without. The plane juddering beneath him, his legs crammed into the small space, he presses his thumb to the smile beneath the plastic sheet. 

_Hannah, I don’t know how to do this again._ He’s never quite known how to do it at all, how to be this person--and wasn’t that because of Jamie all along? Jamie, who had found Rebecca’s body and made all the appropriate calls, her expression stony as she’d explained to the police how they’d found her. Jamie, who had answered the phone that night, turning on her heel with eyes that suddenly took up half her face, apologizing as he’d never heard her do before. Jamie, who made arrangements for food and drink while he stood like a puncture wound in blue jeans staring at what was left of his mother’s estate. 

Jamie, who stood beside him in front of a well, looking down even when he hadn’t been able to stomach it any longer. Jamie, always looking down into the face of cold reality. 

He’s never quite where he needs to be when it happens, but Jamie is. Jamie has always been. She is almost unfairly good at it: standing tall, accepting the truth, holding them all up when they shatter. 

And now, here she is: opening the door in cuffed jeans and a rumpled brown flannel shirt. Here she is, a few years older than Paris, looking at him like she’s never seen him before. Like the woman who called was someone else entirely. He thinks he sees a little of his mother in the blank distance of her eyes, and his heart cracks. 

“What happened?”

She turns from him, gesturing for him to come in. The flat, which has every hallmark of home, is surprisingly warm. Surprisingly messy, too--there are clothes on the couch, most of them things he recognizes as Dani’s from the photos they’ve been mailing his way for years. The floor is covered with pots, lemongrass and tiny succulents and a large-leaved plant he doesn’t recognize standing proudly amid clods of dirt, a watering can, several crumpled packs of cigarettes. 

She reaches for one of these now, taps out the final smoke into her palm, crunches the wrapping. “Want one?”

That voice again, that strange timbre--the accent a little less than he remembers, a little ironed-out by nearly fifteen years in this country, though that isn’t what works a shiver up his spine. It’s so _flat_. It’s so _toneless_. Jamie has been many things since he’s known her--angry, aggressive, cool, even violent--but never this detached. 

He’s never seen her like this. He’s never thought to worry he ever would. Jamie has aways been the most stable of them, taking up the mantle when even he couldn’t carry it. 

_We_ , he thinks wearily, _are the survivors. The witnesses. No one ever talks about what that’s like._

Untrue. _People_ talk about it. People who do useful things, like attend support groups, or get themselves to therapy. Henry does, sometimes--nursing seltzer, smiling ruefully at Owen over dinner. _We think it’s the losing them that hurts the worst, until it happens_ , he’d said once. _It isn’t. It’s the part where you have to keep waking up, dreaming for a split second each morning they’re still here._

Nearly fifteen years, and there hasn’t been a single morning Owen hasn’t thought absently of calling her up. Not one where he hasn’t thought, _Been too long without her voice. Without her laugh. God, that woman’s laugh._

“Jamie...”

Her head comes up sharply, her eyes flashing--and then, like it was never there, the expression passes. She lights the cigarette with a steady hand, settles herself back on the rug with it clamped between her teeth. There’s soil smudged on her cheek, caked into her hair, and he wonders when last she showered. 

“Jamie, do you want to talk about it?”

She doesn’t. He knows that. He remembers too well how she’d sat beside him on a sofa in 1987, passed him a bottle of wine in silence. How she’d said simply, covering all bases in two words, “Fuck it.” 

It had been Dani, he remembers, who spoke of it first. Dani, looking paler than normal, looking shaken, saying firmly, “We should do something. We should do something for her.”

“Sit,” Jamie says without looking at him. She’s already getting back into it, he realizes--working her hands carefully back into a terra cotta pot, brushing the soil from spindly roots with loving care. It’s how she looked after Rebecca, brow furrowed, smoking and working in silence. There are problems that can’t be managed, he understands, and the only way someone like Jamie can tolerate that fact is to find new troubles to set right.

“Where is she, Jamie?” She’s not going to like this, he knows. He’d hate it, in her place. _Had_ hated it, whenever someone dared speak Hannah’s name for those first few months. She’s going to hate him for it now.

But someone has to speak. Someone has to throw the line, lest she drift too far to come back. She called. There was a reason for it. 

“Jamie. Where is she?”

She gives him nothing. Jets smoke, taps ash into an empty beer can, keeps her eyes on the work. This _isn’t_ like after Rebecca, he can see--Jamie back then had been hard-edged, furious that she hadn’t gotten to Becca in time, but she’d at least been willing to hold conversation. More than willing. It had seemed to ground her, reflecting on the Peter Quint of it all, on the shame of not being able to help enough, on how to explain it to the kids. 

Now, she sits with her back against the couch, her eyes not tracking the progress of her own hands. Owen, kneeling beside her, feels as though the room is waiting for something. Waiting for a knife to slide into the bubble she’s built, tearing it open to allow all that building water to rush in. 

He changes tack. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Three days,” she says. Her face is scrunched with concentration, her fingers testing something he can’t track in the roots. 

“Have you eaten?”

“’Course,” she says, gesturing recklessly with the cigarette at a stack of pizza boxes, several empty wine bottles, a dozen abandoned mugs. “All the food groups.”

“Slept?” He remembers that was the worst part, sleeping. Before it had all gone wrong, he’d gone to bed each night with a promise: _Tomorrow, I’ll tell her. Tomorrow, I’ll finally do it._

After, he’d stayed up until dawn in the kitchen, kneading dough, testing wilder and wilder concoctions. Jamie would stumble in at three in the morning, still half-asleep, to find him shoving a bowl of batter under her nose. 

_Here. Try this. What does it need?_

_Cinnamon_ , she’d say gamely, though she’d clearly only been craving a glass of water. He’d slump against the table, head hanging between his arms.

_She’d say it was divine as-is._

_Yeah, well. She always did like to see that idiot grin._

“Jamie,” he says now, patiently. “Have you slept?”

She shrugs. He doesn’t need to walk down the hall to know the bed is likely sitting untouched, perfectly made--or, worse, exactly as she’d rolled out of it the last time. Exactly how she’d left it, when whatever had gone wrong had happened. 

It’s so easy, leaving things. 

It’s nearly impossible, setting them right again when the bigger problem can’t be fixed.

“Where is she, Jamie?” He hates himself. Hates pushing her. Hates the way her shoulders square a little tighter, her jaw clenching, her muddy fingers stretching to find an unopened pack of cigarettes to replace the one burned to nearly nothing between her lips. “Jamie. You called me.”

“Wouldn’t have,” she grumbles, “if I’d thought you’d talk this fucking much.”

Not true. He can see it in her, the shade not of the woman she’d been when they had met--hardy, rugged, a little grin around her mouth that said she’d make him regret it if he even considered pulling on her strings--but the one Dani had loved into being. _We are all_ , he thinks, _shaped by the love they give. Changes the molecules. Turns us from dough to something worth serving._

The woman he’d met, tempered by a past she never discussed, patience she couldn't quite get a handle on, wouldn’t want him to talk this much.

The woman she is now, the one who had sat in his restaurant watching Dani like she was written in the only language worth knowing, called for a reason.

“Jamie.”

“Stop.” She closes her eyes. Her hands are shaking too hard to work out another cigarette, too hard to urge the Bic to light. 

“Where,” he asks gently. She’s shaking her head. When did so much silver slip into her hair? When did those lines crop up around her mouth? How long has it been, since he was where she needed him to be?

_Didn’t need me. Not then. Had everything she needed, with Dani, but now--_

“Jamie, where--”

“She’s _gone_.” Her eyes are blazing, her lips trembling. He has never, _never_ seen this look on her face. This shattered, almost exultant misery is impossible to endure. She doesn’t look like Jamie now. She is only a collection of her worst fears made real. “She’s _gone_ , Owen. She’s--”

She hunches into herself, a single crack splitting like a windscreen beneath a thrown rock. One foot lashes out sharply, sending a pot cartwheeling over onto its side. 

“She’s fucking gone,” she repeats in a voice like a woman kicked in the stomach. She raises her eyes, red-rimmed, and almost smiles. “I fell asleep.”

Strange, he thinks as he shuffles across the rug to wrap his arms around her, the last thought that kicks out when they’re gone. Not _I should have told her_ , not _I should have been there_ , but: _I was in the kitchen._ Not _I should have stopped her_ , not _I should have been faster_ , but: _I fell asleep._ The should doesn’t matter anymore, once they’re gone. All that matters is what you did. Where you were. What you can never change. 

“I fell asleep,” she repeats, and there’s nothing flat about her voice now. Even speaking of Rebecca, the Wingraves, Hannah, she’s never sounded half this shattered. “I fell asleep, Owen. I fell--”

He’s pressing his face against her shoulder, feeling unforgivably enormous draped this way over her slight frame. She folds double, rocking back and forth, one hand digging so hard into the other arm that he’ll be gently patching bloody gouges in an hour’s time. For now, he only sways with her, allowing the momentum of her grief to rock him back and forth, back and forth.

“She’s gone,” she says again. “She’s gone. She’s--”

He’ll stay a while--not quite feeling secure leaving her on her own, not quite willing to risk letting her slide back into this space. He’ll stay, helping her in the kitchen ( _She was better at it. Less likely to poison us, anyway._ ), and with the nightmare of making those phone calls ( _Her mum needs to know. Hated me, but still. And Judy O’Mara. And Henry. Fuck. The kids won’t even..._ ). She won’t let him near the bedroom, won’t let him tuck her into that bed. The one and only time he’ll offer to help sift through Dani’s belongings, she’ll flex a fist around a bottle like she’s thinking of swinging it at him. 

She won’t look at him when he steps into the bathroom to find the tub draining over the side onto the floor, either, the sink full of clean water. When he opens his mouth to question, she’ll reach past him, slap down the plunger, stride out of the room without a word. 

_Leave her whatever rituals she needs_ , he’ll think, remembering all those unnecessary three-a.m. cakes. _Leave her whatever ghosts she can’t let go._

He’ll stay as long as she needs, he decides with her beginning to sob at last. He’s never quite been there, when it happens--never been able to look death in the eye as Jamie has. It’s the greatest injustice in the world, how many loved ones have gone on without him, leaving only stories in their wake. 

He’s never where he needs to be, to stop it happening--but he can be here. For a little while, at least. He can hold her, and he can look down. 

There is no justice, this time, in letting Jamie believe she needs to be strong enough to do it alone.


End file.
